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 goes negative for age groups >30
Mounting evidence natural immunity is a better deal
Updates out of police state Australia
COVID-19
Infection rates among the vaccinated are now higher in all age groups >30 in England for the circulating Delta variant.
I’m being very precise with my language here. I’m speaking in terms of infection rates. That means we’ve already normalized by vaccination status. Which also means we can interpret vaccination rates as a proxy for the odds of getting infected.
So let me say it again. If you’re in a >30 age group in the UK, it’s more likely you’ll get infected with SARS-CoV-2 if you’re vaccinated, than if you’re not vaccinated.
There are, of course, various confounding variables at play here. We don’t know what proportion of unvaccinated has already acquired natural immunity. If that proportion is high, we would expect them to fair better against the vaccinated. We also can’t account for changes in behavior between vaccinated and unvaccinated.
With all that said, it’s still a bit surreal to see this inversion. Vaccine effectiveness against infection is now negative for those over 30 in the UK.
Vaccine effectiveness against severe disease and death is still high, albeit waning like everywhere else.
Note that in the UK they got started with their vaccination campaign about 2 months earlier than the rest of Europe and they primarily used AstraZeneca.
But we can expect waning to occur in the rest of Europe as well.
A new paper came out reporting on the data in Qatar, where they primarily used Pfizer. Vaccine effectiveness against infection wanes to 20% after 5 months after the second dose.
The data is starting to look similar in The Netherlands (where most jabs have been Pfizer) where they are also seeing a waning of vaccine effectiveness against infection. The red lines represent the vaccination coverage. If the vaccines were 0% effective at preventing infection we would expect to see the same ratio among the people tested as among the people vaccinated in the population. In the graph this would mean the bars would touch the red lines. What we see is that the bars are starting to approach the red lines as time goes by. The same thing can be observed in the UK, Israel and Qatar.
Belgium seems to have a much more sane policy than others. They’ve pretty much opened up everything while placing an emphasis on ventilating all indoor areas. While also encouraging the use of CO2 meters and using CO2 levels as a proxy for the level of ventilation that is being achieved. Their slogan: “Ventilate well, and enjoy your freedom” still sounds a bit despotic, but it seems preferable over a QR code society.
Meanwhile Scandinavia has stopped Moderna vaccinations due to concerns over myocarditis. In most cases only for younger age groups. They’re still recommending these groups get vaccinated with Pfizer though.
The regulatory agencies will not have taken such a decision lightly. In doing so they’re breaking rank with their European counterparts. They will have done so knowing full well the negative impact it will have on the perception of the vaccination campaign across the world.
This puts Moderna and vaccine-zealous governments in a difficult spot as they’ve been seeking authorization to allow vaccination of increasingly younger age groups around the world.
COVID-19 skews towards unhealthy, old people, whereas the myocarditis risk in the mRNA vaccines seems to skew towards health, young men. Florian Dagoury, a static-breath-holding freediver has reportedly been diagnosed with myocarditis following the Pfizer vaccine.
I’m seeing reports of myocarditis on Twitter. I considered sharing some more here, but I’m skeptical of these reports. I’m also skeptical of official figures on myocarditis which all seem to conclude it’s a vanishingly small risk.
Ultimately we find the truth through the scientific method, and the way we avoid fooling ourselves in that process is by adopting a default attitude of skepticism. Carl Sagan explains it better than I can.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that natural immunity, or immunity induced through natural infection, is a better deal than vaccine-induced immunity.
One way we know this is by looking at which antibodies people have. The spike-based vaccines only induce spike-targeted antibodies (S). Natural infection, however, induces other antibodies (in addition to S), such as the nucleocapsid antibody (N), which can also be measured.
So if we measure the antibodies in the population we can interpret the presence of S-antibodies as a proxy for someone that either got vaccinated or was naturally infected, and N-antibodies as a proxy for someone that was naturally infected. By looking at the ratios of these antibodies across the population we can infer things about population-wide immunity.
One question was whether those who got vaccinated and were subsequently infected would develop additional antibodies (such as N). If that were the case, we’d expect to measure higher ratios of people with both S and N antibodies as more and more vaccinated people experience breakthrough infections.
This isn’t what we’ve been seeing however. The ratio of the population with N antibodies in the UK has remained constant for the past weeks, despite a wave of COVID-19 infections (and many breakthrough cases) followed by a relatively high plateau.
This is what one would expect if Original Antigenic Sin is occurring. A phenomenon for which Geert Vanden Bossche warned back in his first interview with Bret Weinstein.
Basically, our first exposure to an antigen ends up dictating our subsequent responses. When our first exposure is the vaccine, we’re somewhat stuck with a narrow response to the spike protein alone. When our first exposure is a natural infection, we’re “stuck” with a broad response (to all antigens) — but it’s actually a good thing to be “stuck” with a broad response.
Gabor Erdosi thinks this is the reason we haven’t seen variant booster updates from the vaccine companies: Booster shots targeting the Delta variant wouldn’t be able to “update” or broaden the immune response of vaccinated individuals.
A recent Nature publication suggests that natural infection confers certain advantages in terms of how your memory B-cells (your immune reservoir containing a diversity of antibodies) continue to evolve, and develop increasingly broad and potent antibodies that can deal with variants.
In contrast, vaccine induced B cells don’t continue to evolve to develop broad and potent antibodies.
Vaccine boosters using the original Wuhan strain work (for now) by increasing the quantity of antibodies, not by increasing their quality.
How will vaccine-induced immunity fare against future variants? Will they be able to simply get a variant-booster? I’m doubtful.
Lastly an update on long-covid. The UK government has revised their estimates of the prevalence of this condition downwards. The data on this gets murky very quickly, largely because “long covid” is a fuzzy term, but it seems now its lower than 5%.
This week in totalitarianism
It’s unfortunate this has to be a recurring section, but what’s happening in Australia really seems excessive and requires copious amounts of disinfecting sunlight.
Here are two police officers being recorded while they visit a citizen at their home questioning them about their participation in a protest rally (deduced through social media surveillance).
Here’s a new advertisement from the Australian government casting the unvaccinated as hypocritical, low-life junkies.
Here’s a heartbreaking story from a Lithuanian couple detailing the difficulties they’re facing living as unvaccinated in Lithuania.
Google keyword warrants are a thing, apparently. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Australian government is issuing warrants for “corona protest” search queries.