Hello friends,
Welcome to another edition of Weekly Crystallizations!
Vaccine passports
Switzerland, where I live, has decided to instate a COVID certificate requirement for all indoor events. There are some exceptions (I’m happy to report my girlfriend and I will be able to continue to go to our dance class as it falls under a <30 people exception), but it’s about as strict as the Swiss have gotten so far this pandemic.
With the winter approaching, the move by the Swiss is representative of a move made by numerous governments in the Northern hemisphere. US President Biden announced vaccine mandates for federal employees and large businesses. France has been running under a vaccine mandate for the past weeks already. I’m sure more will follow.
What’s striking is that the rational argument for vaccine passports/certificates has crumbled in recent months to the point of seemingly nothing being left.
For one, most countries don’t recognize immunity acquired through natural infection (unless you’re able to present a positive PCR test), even though infection-acquired immunity now been recognized to be almost 30x more protective than vaccine-induced immunity.
Universities are supposed to be bastions of science. Stunning that their universal vaccine mandates dismiss natural immunity from prior COVID infection, which is stronger longer lasting than from vaccines. Will take years to recover their credibility.In Israel, vaccinated individuals had 27 times higher risk of symptomatic COVID infection compared to those with natural immunity from prior COVID disease [95%CI:13-57, adjusted for time of vaccine/disease]. No COVID deaths in either group. https://t.co/hopImCD1D0Martin Kulldorff @MartinKulldorffSecondly, the vaccines are leaky vaccines. They don’t fully protect against infection, and whatever protection they do offer seems to wane with time (Pfizer going from 95% to ~50% in Israel). In terms of preventing transmission, they seem to offer little to no benefit once you’re infected.
Had the vaccines been more effective, the argument for COVID certificates would have been stronger. But since they’re not, the argument is weakened. It’s plausible, for instance, it might end up causing more infections rather than less.
My sense is that the argument for vaccine passports from the governmental perspective was always two-pronged.
It would allow the vaccinated elements of society to go back to normal, doubling as a carrot for getting vaccinated.
The restrictions placed on the unvaccinated would serve as a stick to the unvaccinated for getting the jab. Cajoling more people to get vaccinated, would reduce cases & deaths.
(1) seems to crumbling, but (2) is still alive and well.
Here’s Israeli’s Minister of Health (allegedly) telling Israeli’s Minister of Interior that there is no medical or epidemiological justification for the COVID passport (i.e. (1)), the only argument is to “pressure the unvaccinated” (i.e. (2)).
There are of course even more sinister motives that one project onto the powers that be for instating vaccine passports. What autocrat would not want a way to control who gets to go where? The infrastructure for vaccine passports can be used for rational pandemic response policy, but it’s also one step closer to a totalitarian state.
And if you really tune in to the people in charge, and their coordinated messaging, I find it hard to not come away with very weird vibes about what is going on. See for instance this compilation 👇.
A friend of mine asked: “How do you even protest against this [vaccine passports], if protests get shadowbanned on social media?”
I’m not sure I know the answer to that question, but one thing does come to mind: Crypto — and specifically permissionless and censorship resistant public blockchains.
While the physical world seems to be undergoing an unwelcome upgrade to a more permissioned society, the digital world is undergoing un upgrade to a more permissionless society. And in contrast to the physical world, in the blockchain world the rules cannot arbitrarily be changed by a select few.
COVID-19
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying made an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast and discussed, among other things, Geert Vanden Bossche’s hypothesis that the vaccination campaign would drive immune escape.
David Fuller from Rebel Wisdom, whose work I’ve shared before, critiques their argument in this thread. Bret and Heather seem to be saying that there’s evidence that each of the variants emerged in geographical and temporal vicinity to a vaccine trial. This would be evidence in favor of Geert Vanden Bossche’s argument.
I, as David, did not find this part of their argument particularly persuasive. If such a comparatively small event such as a vaccine trial can trigger variants by virtue of the selection pressure that gets exerted, why haven’t subsequent vaccine rollouts triggered even more variants? Hasn’t the selection pressure exerted by vaccine-induced immunity done little but increase since then? Wouldn’t that make immune escape more likely?
I’ll admit, I’m not sure I’m understanding their argument in full detail. Evolutionary dynamics can be counterintuitive. Perhaps, once a variant emerges which partially evades immunity and picks up a transmission advantage (i.e. Delta), it raises the bar for the rest of the gene pool, rendering subsequent variants far less likely. One Twitter commenter likened it to a polar bear evolving white fur in response to its environment, but then logically not experiencing selection pressure to evolve any further once it has.
In any case, Bret and Heather in their detailed argumentation rely on the work of biostatistician Mathew Crawford, who weighs into the thread above, essentially claiming David is mistaken and isn’t trying to clarify by asking the right people (e.g. biostatisticians). His original piece, part of which is quoted above, ties together the origins of the variants to the locations of the vaccine trials. No sources are provided, however, so one would need to trust his analysis or dive deeper one’s self.
His followup piece linked here above, which he tweeted in response to David and myself above, makes a convincing case how “vaccine partisans” are publicly misinterpreting recent papers on the topic. Most notably Eric Topol here below
who wrongly infers that lower mutation frequency (=occurrence of mutations) in higher vaxx countries suggests that being vaccinated suppresses mutations. In reality, the data shows that the viral pool in high vaxx countries are more self-similar. A result which is completely consistent with the hypothesis that vaccines are driving the variants by selecting for variants that escape immunity (by killing off the ones that don’t).
I’m not sure where the following piece fits into all of this, but I think it’s a striking observation in and of itself. Apparently it takes flu strains 2-5 years to sweep through the global viral population. Delta swept through in ~1 year despite all the restrictions.
Misc
This is an important concept in the current online environment. Partisans try to dunk on each other, creating strawmen out of their opponent’s arguments and laughing at them. Conor Friedersdorf has a name for this: “disdainful ridicule”, and encourages us to question whether it serves a purpose if we think of the other person as one of our own. Hint: it doesn’t.
Amazing project I frequently use. 👇
Apparently marital rape is not illegal in many countries.
Glenn Greenwald calling it as it is:
Crypto
Put unsolved mathematical puzzles in smart contracts on the blockchain so that a reward can be unlocked when a solution is found.
Interesting mental model: The price of Bitcoin is a lagging indicator of people’s understanding of money.
Great analysis on the recent Ivermectin overdosing drama by Scott Alexander. He highlights how critical we are of information that we don’t like, and how uncritical we are towards information that we do.
The US is a major outlier in terms of health care expenditure vs. life expectancy.