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:
Vaccine Effectiveness against infection hitting 0
Are vaccines driving immune escape?
YouTube’s new censorship campaign
COVID-19
Take a look at the case rates in Portugal (~80% vaccination rate) and Singapore (>80%). Cases have sky rocketed in Singapore despite having one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.
The truth is that increasing vaccination rates will not “get us out of the pandemic” as I’ve seen many public health officials and scientists proclaim in the last weeks.
One reason for this, of course, is that we’re dealing with leaky vaccines (a term which sounds snarky, but it’s the official term) that do not prevent infection or transmission.
Not only are they leaky, but it’s increasingly clear that they become more leaky as time goes by. This is likely due to (1) a (expected) decrease in antibodies in combination with (2) the virus becoming more resistant to vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies.
The vaccine protection against severe disease and mortality still seems to be high based on the data coming out of England.
However, in their most recent report Public Health England report a risk of infection among the vaccinated which is greater than for the unvaccinated (in some age groups). In other words: vaccination was associated with an increased risk of infection.
I would still be careful to draw any conclusions from this data. There are still several confounding variables here that have not been taken into account. For instance, if you segregate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated and let them congregate as normal, you may be eliciting higher degrees of in-group spread. This would show up as decreased effectiveness of the vaccine, even though it wouldn’t be an inherent property of vaccine-induced immunity.
That said, this makes it increasingly difficult to keep afloat the idea that vaccine passports/certificates make any sense. If vaccine passport policies are maintained, increased in-group spread (if it is indeed an important factor) could result in the appearance of reduced vaccine effectiveness, thus torpedoing the case for vaccines (and by extension vaccine passports).
Another confounding variable is that Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) may influence the evolutionary dynamics of the virus. Social distancing, for instance, delays infection chains, and thus spreads out infections over time. This also allows natural selection to take place over a longer time period, potentially resulting in more adaptive evolution.
What is clear is that vaccine protection against infection wanes, and it looks like it disappears completely. What isn’t clear (at least not to me), how much of that waning is due to a natural ebbing of antibodies vs. evolutionary adaptations by the virus.
Geert Vanden Bossche’s claims that the evolving narrative about the vaccine simply reflects the evolutionary dynamics of the virus.
Interestingly, in his recent interview with Robert Malone, he mentions what data would prove/disprove his hypothesis. He calls for sequencing the genome of vaccinated breakthrough cases to see if they show higher ratios of mutations that are resistant to vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies.
A study that does just this seems to exist. What they show is that people with breakthrough infections carry higher ratios of antibody-resistant mutations than the unvaccinated (78% vs. 48%).
They conclude:
In summary, our results reveal that selection pressure in a highly vaccinated community […] favors more infectious, antibody-resistant VOCs such as the gamma and delta variants […].
This lends support for Geert’s argument that mass vaccination drives the virus to escape vaccine-induced immunity. Gabor rephrases it here:
If a waning vaccine in the face of an evolving virus isn’t enough to worry about, it’s still unclear to me what the safety profile is of these vaccines. Here’s a troubling analysis by @masimaux.
He shows, by diving deep into the appendices of a recent Moderna vaccine efficacy study, that they report a 1/1000 probability of a (grade 4) potentially life-threatening adverse event associated with the second shot in their 18-65yo, not-at-risk subgroup.
Startups and innovation
I sincerely hope Balaji is right about “high IQ” content being on the rise. Especially since it seems YouTube is developing into a political platform (more on that later).
This week in totalitarianism
Last week YouTube announced it would start expanding its efforts to battle “medical misinformation” based on “medical consensus”. The problem, of course, is who watches the watchers? Who determines what qualifies as misinformation and consensus. YouTube of course.
One of their first targets was Dr. Ron Paul, himself a physician, and long-term libertarian congressman. No strikes, evidence or repeal process. Just a simple deletion of his popular channel.
One reason (possibly the most important reason) this is stupid is that in order to narrow in on the truth, you need to entertain some wacky hypotheses.
Another reason is that it’s often not always possible to distinguish between information that is misleading and information that is simply uncomfortable or counter-narrative.
One would think this is a lesson we would take from history. Let’s also not forget that information on the lab leak hypothesis was censored when it first came out. Now it’s mainstream.
Consider also the case of someone overselling vaccines. Scientists have been doing this all over Twitter and YouTube for months. This is not seen as medical misinformation, but questioning mass vaccination is.
Lastly, a short clip from our friends down under, which has seem to devolved in an actual police state. No exaggeration.
Crypto
Interesting thread on the bullish case for Non-fungible Tokens.
Ethereum’s big merge seems to have been pushed forward once again.