Hello friends,
Quick heads up: Next week there will be no edition of Weekly Crystallizations as I’ll be taking a 1 week vacation. The week after that we’ll be back to normal.
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:
The Rogan-Berensen podcast
Do we even know what’s happening with vaccine effectiveness? (No)
Possible roots of COVID-certificate self-righteous pressuring
COVID-19
Winter is coming, and as expected for a seasonal respiratory virus, COVID-19 cases are rising across the Northern hemisphere.
The usual disclaimer applies: let’s not fixate on case counts for a disease for which the vast majority of people will never develop serious symptoms. At the same time it’s worth knowing what data is being used to craft the prevailing narrative.
Last week Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, had Alex Berenson on, a reporter who was banned from Twitter for his reporting on vaccines.
The interview is excellent. Berenson lays out the case for being skeptical of the mRNA vaccines:
The vaccines started out being very effective, but now they seem to have lost a lot of their effectiveness (mainly against infection). Which makes one wonder, what does the situation look like a couple of months from now?
The safety profile is much worse than any other vaccines we’re familiar with.
The (social) media environment is such that you cannot talk about the above.
Berenson shows Rogan the same figures I quoted last week from the UK government showing that vaccine effectiveness against infection has become negative for all age groups above 30. Here they are again:
John Burn-Murdoch, who’s my favorite data visualizer and also a great explainer, offers a counterpoint. He claims that in the report they divide by faulty population numbers to get to the case rates per vaccinated/unvaccinated population.
And if one were to take the vaccination/age population numbers from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) (which he claims are more accurate), the numbers look quite different.
It’s an interesting counterpoint, and John explains it in terms of faulty government estimates.
In short, most governments don’t know how many people live in their country, so they estimate
But even if vaccine effectiveness against infection has not turned negative, the first graph seems to suggest. It is clearly waning with time. So the fact that things don’t look as bad now doesn’t tell us anything about how they’ll look some months from now.
Either way, any COVID-19 data analysis is a minefield and one should tread carefully. I warned for possible confounders last week (which are still present) but the issue highlighted by John can be considered more of a data artefact. You should be on the lookout for both if you’re diving into COVID-19 graphs and data yourself.
A classic example of this minefield is the case of Sweden. Sweden famously had one of the least stringent COVID-19 responses and fared better (in terms of mortality) than many European nations.
However, they did not fare better than neighboring Scandinavian countries, which led many to remark that Sweden could only be compared to its Scandinavian siblings. If we compare them now, however, they all seem quite… well… comparable.
It sort of looks like the old people that died earlier in the pandemic in Sweden are now dying after all in Finland and Denmark. And Norway doesn’t even know there’s a pandemic.
Another interesting case, if you feel like confusing yourself, or vaccine-confident friend, is Singapore. This highly developed, highly organized, highly respiratory virus aware nation state has a higher COVID fatality per capita than the world at the moment.
Or how about this recent research from Harvard showing there’s no correlation between vaccination rates and COVID infections. Higher vaccination rates don’t correlate with lower infection rates.
The ambiguity in interpreting the data and the uncertainty inherent in everything we can measure is not at all reflected in the confidence covid certificate proponents have in the policies they support.
If you believe that (1) the virus is very dangerous and (2) the vaccines are completely safe, it becomes rational to (want to) pressure others into getting vaccinated. After all, getting them to vaccinate themselves reduces the risk for others and yourself. And we’re imagining there’s no real discussion around the veracity of (1) and (2).
It so happens that I think both (1) and (2) are generally inflated in public discourse. But if I adopt those beliefs, as a thought experiment, I find myself more interested in pressuring people and less interested in hearing their reasons for not wanting to get an obviously safe vaccine.
Over the last weeks I’ve gotten the sense that if you believe such things, a module comes online in your mind’s operating system, which is programmed to socially and self-righteously pressure and shame people that are not falling in line. It appears I’m not the only one to have entertained this hypothesis. It seems there’s some evidence lending support to the argument that people that worry about contagious illnesses are more likely to espouse moral values of obeying authority and being loyal to the group.
Even though we’re still speaking in terms of the Delta variant, the virus continues to mutate. The emerging strains so far don’t seem to have enough of a competitive advantage that they can become dominant, but it’s important to realize that the landscape is always changing.
I’m reminded by something Geert Vanden Bossche has said:
Not fully crystallized
This week I’m adding this new experimental section. It’s for tweets I’m not sure what to make of yet. Often they seem potentially important, but also potentially misleading. I want to be careful not to amplify misleading information, but I also want to be diligent in amplifying weird signals before they’re so obvious they needn’t be be amplified further.
Henning Rosenbusch links to a story about NBA player Brandon Goodwin who reports his health deteriorating in the period after getting vaccinated.
“I was super tired in the games. When we played Philly back-to-back [Apr. 28-30], bro, I was so tired,” Goodwin said, during a Twitch stream on Oct. 3. “I felt like I couldn’t run up and down the court. My back was hurting. Then we went home, that’s when my back really started hurting bad. Then I’m like I have to go to the doctor, that’s when I found out I had blood clots.”
This reminds me of an argument made in a recent paper critical of the idea of vaccinating children: What about the people that experience pre-symptom level adverse effects from the vaccination? Not enough damage to get diagnosed with myocarditis, but enough to experience negative health effects down the line.
If the clinical trials that were performed by Pfizer and Moderna were designed to focus on efficacy and only adverse effects at the symptom level of description as an indicator of safety, the trial results would be limited to the identification of rare events, and the trial results would potentially under-estimate the actual pre-symptom level damage from the inoculations.
Another tweet that falls within this line of thought:
Possibly due to COVID restrictions across the world, influenza also seemed to have disappeared in many countries. At the same time we’ve seen an apparent surge in Respiratory Syncytial Virus. But what’s surprising is that it has popped up outside of its usual seasonal pattern.
This week in totalitarianism
Dutch public health minister Huge de Jonge while addressing a journalist and speaking in general terms about unvaccinated COVID-19 patients in the hospital:
“You’re [any unvaccinated patient] lying in a bed that was actually meant for someone else”
Dutch legal expert Raisa Blommestijn highlights the dangers this line of thinking leads to. “What’s next?” she asks, “withholding medical care from the unvaccinated?”.
I’m not sure what’s next, but for what’s possible (apparently) we need only to look at Australia. The Australian PM, in one of the most creepy speeches I’ve ever heard in my life, announces a $5000 for not getting vaccinated. I see a weak, scared and self-righteous man, who no longer sees the human on the other side of the argument, who is using the state’s monopoly on violence to inflict damages on those that scare him. What do you see?
Joe Rogan, in the Berenson podcast linked to above, mentions that Australians gave up their guns to the government in a 1996 buy back program following a mass shooting. He explains that when you know you’ve got the physical upper hand to some counter party (and given the right conditions) you end up exerting this power. It’s hard to argue that what we’ve seen from Australia would have occurred if its citizenry was still armed.
This week in resistance
Misc
I find it interesting to see and think about the possible societal impact virtual and augmented reality are going to have. Here an AR app puts a smile on people’s dreary faces in realtime in the London underground. It made me smile.