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:
Lockdownpallooza
Boosters work, but then what?
Vaccine-induced immunity hampers breadth of immune response
COVID-19
Austria announces a lockdown for the unvaccinated. I’m at a loss for words. If you had told me this 1 year ago, I would have dismissed it as highly, highly unlikely. But here we are.
The Netherlands also made the news as being the first country in Europe to re-introduce the lockdown — the regular flavor. But they’re also introducing the 2G rule from Germany, excluding people that don’t have proof of vaccination or proof of recovery form obtaining a COVID certificate. @freddiesayers weighs in on how such a (nominally) liberal country could be taking such autocratic action. His thesis: technocratic politicians. That’s only a partial explanation. Another important factor is the technocratic intelligentsia in the Netherlands who lend support to such politicians and have been largely supportive of the vaccine-focused pandemic response.
It’s worth noting that lockdowns were actually never part of the European pandemic response. Nor are they part of the WHO’s recommendations. Neither are vaccine passports.
@rosenbusch_ offers a historical analog (unverified):
“When the killing of the cats unexpectedly increased the rat infestation and worsened the plague, townspeople reconsidered their policies and found they were not strict enough. And so they started killing cat owners too.”
One of the best articles I’ve read about the pandemic, vaccine safety and more by @ceisenstein. Some quotes:
[an assumption that is made is] that Covid vaccines are by and large safe, necessary, and generally beneficial for personal and public health. Therefore, opposition to them must be explained in psychological or sociological terms, because we all know that, scientifically speaking, opposition is baseless.
Dr. Doidge seems to be saying, “The shots are safe and effective, and society would be better off if everyone got them, but many people are quite understandably reluctant because of past experience.”
The obvious question here is, Why does Doidge himself trust the science promoted by the very companies and regulators whose misdeeds he so compellingly enumerates? He seems to take for granted that the vaccines have a low rate of adverse reactions. Are the agencies saying that, and the data they utilize, reliable? The article’s tagline implies that he knows it is; otherwise, he wouldn’t wonder “what to do about [vaccine hesitancy]”. He would be wondering instead what to do about vaccine credulity or vaccine naivete.
Evidence that boosters are working from the UK by @EricTopol. This is a pretty amazing result considering the boosters still encode for the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain which is no longer circulating. Which does raise the question: How exactly are they working?
Another question, is of course, for how long will they work? And what to do after that? @jsm2334 shows that that we’re already seeing waning in Israel, so I would expect another booster round to be announced pretty soon. Perhaps this winter already.
France seems to already be counting on a 6 month booster and exclusion schedule.
Antibody tests are used to determine if someone has undergone natural infection. In a past newsletter I talked about how there’s still some uncertainty about interpreting those levels and inferring protection from them. @andrew_croxford shares a paper which shows that testing for a different antibody (anti-membrane antibodies) seem to give more reliable results because the antibodies don’t wane as quickly. It’s been said that some people don’t become immune after infection, but we may have been looking at the “wrong” antibodies.
This same paper has another interesting gem.
Interestingly, all four vaccine breakthrough infection subjects who had previous COVID-19 were seropositive for anti-membrane IgG during acute infection, while no breakthrough subjects without prior COVID-19 had detectable anti-membrane antibodies in the acute infection period (Figure 1I).
What they’re saying is: Vaccinated individuals that experience a breakthrough infection do not develop antibodies to the parts of the virus that is not encoded by the vaccine.
This is in my view one of the strongest reasons not to get vaccinated: Vaccinating naive individuals may very well hamper their immune response for life. This may or may not become a problem. We don’t know. But ignoring the issue is irresponsible.
Vaccine side effects
France joins a list of countries that have recently halted the Moderna vaccine in some capacity.
Another compilation of athletes mysteriously collapsing, dying from @RWMaloneMD.
But I agree with @inthenewlife, we need more than compilations to figure out what is going on.
After touching on the emerging hypothesis last week that an increase in excess deaths in various countries might be attributable to the vaccines, I decided to dive a bit deeper.
I looked into the Swiss data for hospitalizations and vaccinations to see if I could find a correlation between the two.
I had a couple of insights, here are some highlights. Click on one of them to view the whole thread on Twitter.
My conclusion so far:
There are suspicious up and downticks in non-COVID hospitalizations that correspond with up and down ticks in vaccines adminstered. It seems plausible this could be caused by vaccine side effects that are not being recorded as such.
Swiss hospitals are at record high occupancy since the beginning of the pandemic, but it cannot fully be explained by COVID *or* the vaccines.
It seems as though there is something about the pandemic itself that is causing the hospitals to be overrun. A backlog of patients? Perhaps that’s part of the answer. But the uptrend starts before the pandemic takes hold.
Crypto
@JanGold_ thinks crypto doesn’t render gold irrelevant just yet, because it’s still the preferred back up currency for central banks. That too could change though…
I’m not sure why all NFTs would have art associated with them, but @balajis seems ahead on the curve on these things, so it’s something I’ll continue to ponder.
Not only is it not yet clear who the winners are in the blockchain world, it’s also unclear what dimensions they’re competing on. @krugermacro believes that because Ethereum isn’t specializing, it’s destined to lose out against Bitcoin and Solana. I don’t know enough about Solana to provide further context though.
Resistance
Misc
Inflation
Shadowstats maintains a separate calculation of the US inflation figures that adhere to the definition before it was changed by the government (at least once in the mid 1980s). They find a rate of 15% right now.