Hello friends,
Welcome to a new edition of Weekly Crystallizations, a weekly newsletter where I highlight tweets from people making sense of what’s going on in the world today!
In this week’s edition:
COVID-19 (yes, still, I’m sorry)
Lab Leak (yes, also COVID-19, sorry again)
Crypto
Misc
COVID-19
Pierre Kory is a an MD and critical care physician who became widely known for his strong recommendation for using ivermectin off-label for COVID-19 prophylaxis and early treatment.
His ivermectin case always made a lot of sense to me, and I felt he was speaking earnestly. Here, however, I think he’s making a mistake I’ve seen many other scientists make this pandemic: They oversell their case. To make their point, they omit important details and highlight others.
Here Pierre highlights the case of Uttar Pradesh a province in India with approximately 240 million people. The COVID-19 case count is effectively 0, as he says. And with a vaccination rate of ~5%, he attributes this result to ivermectin.
Slovborg jumps in the comments and highlights that Uttar Pradesh has very high seroprevalence rates (which seem to have been measured fairly recently). In other words, 71% of the population must have had COVID and is now immune. Put differently, what we’re looking at here is herd immunity.
Ivermectin could have played a role in achieving that result, as it’s still plausible it improves outcomes for early treatment. But did 170 million (71%), or a significant number of people, in Uttar Pradesh take ivermectin as early treatment? I doubt it. But if that were the case, Pierre should have specified that information.
In any case, that graph of Uttar Pradesh, that’s what herd immunity looks like. As far as I understand it that’s also the end state of all pandemics.
Why don’t the case counts in the high vaxx West look anything like that though?
The difference of course is the make up of the seropositive population. How much immunity is due to natural infection and how much is due to the vaccine? In the US one estimate puts the total seroprevalence for COVID antibodies at 83% with about 20% deriving from natural immunity.
One need only compare the graph of Uttar Pradesh (seroprevalence 71%) with UK, Israel or the US (seroprevalence 80%+) to see that natural immunity is far more effective at reducing the infectious pressure.
This is also one of the points Geert Vanden Bossche makes in this exchange with Robert Malone in this recent interview. Although he admits his prediction of immune escape has not come to pass yet, his other prediction: (1) the emergence of multiple more-infectious variants, has happened. It’s long, but it’s worth a listen — or have a read through my thread here.
One important conclusion Geert draws is that the vaccinated will not contribute to lowering the infectious pressure once a variant which partially evades their immunity has become dominant. Their defences no longer work to block the chain of infections.
The only ones who can block the chain of infections are those that have natural immunity (or possibly through innate immunity), as we can clearly see in Uttar Pradesh.
This realization, that the unvaccinated after infection will bring down case counts, is only just starting to catch on.
Of course, to get natural immunity, you need to undergo natural infection. There’s some risks involved there for older age groups.
Last week I shared some tweets by Trevor Bedford, a researcher and statistician who studies viral evolution, featuring his latest research results on viral evolution in SARS-CoV-2. What he found were strong indications of adaptive evolution in the spike protein.
Trevor also made a video going deeper into this research. What follows is a blogpost which is a commentary on that video. The central point the author makes is that if you’re seeing elevated mutations in the spike protein in an environment where you’re mass vaccinating with a spike-based vaccine, your vaccine campaign is probably driving that evolution (i.e. Geert Vanden Bossche’s original argument.)
So here we have beautiful evidence of elevated Spike mutations in the lineages that become dominant post vaccination with Spike only vaccines and no such elevated mutagenesis outside of spike.
Although mRNA spike-based vaccines will have this effect, there seem to be other types of vaccines on the horizon. Here’s an intranasal live attenuated viral vaccine (where the virus is kept alive, but modified so it is less pathogenic).
Here’s a collection of short interviews with victims of adverse effects from the mRNA vaccines in Israel. It’s harrowing. I hesitate to share this because it is anecdotal evidence and I cannot vouch for its veracity. That said, it appears legit to me. Make up your own mind I would say.
Lastly on the topic of COVID, I include this tweet. A news report on apparently many people reporting serious COVID-like symptoms without ever testing positive. I myself and some family members had the same thing happen to us. We got sick, had many of the symptoms associated with COVID-19, but kept testing negative. I believe it can be important to keep track of these types of bottom-up signals to get an early reading of what’s going on.
Lab leak
A new leak sheds some more light on the lab leak hypothesis, which is becoming increasingly more likely. The main defender, also the main suspect, also the subject of this leak, happens to have proposed researching “enhancing bat SARS viruses by a human specific furin cleavage site, in collaboration with Wuhan Institute for virology”.
It’s hard to read the above and not come away thinking that a lab leak is likely and that Daszak played a key role in it happening.
What is worth reflecting on however, as Eric Weinstein has as do, is that 77 Nobel Laureates stood up in his defence when the lab leak hypothesis was first suggested. That seems like a disproportionate amount of firepower.
Eric suspects there’s a bigger power structure involved that was working to sweep this under the rug.
Crypto
Chris Dixon has a nice thread on how platforms in today’s web (Web2) take 100% share of the value that their users contribute. E.g. you don’t get paid for tweeting the best tweets on Twitter, and the amount of Spotify artists that make serious money are limited.
Web3 (i.e. crypto) and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are changing that. Crypto brought us digital ownership and programmable shared state. You can use those building blocks to create platforms where the value gets distributed among the creators. Chris’ thesis is: the near 100% that Web2 platforms take is not sustainable, and they will get disrupted by Web3 platforms that are more equitable.