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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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We need pathophysiological studies and autopsies - once again extreme lack of interest in autopsy for vaccine recipients.

What study are you proposing? In any given day, some number of vaccinated and unvaccinated people will contract a pulmonary embolism or myocarditis. If you open them up, odds are they'll look pretty similar. You're better off with population-level studies, which have been done and the answer is a few cases of myocarditis per million vaccine doses. Also skewed towards younger men, which again, affects the calculus for whether the vaccine provides any net benefit to certain demographics.

There is a suspicious group of studies that cast extreme doubt on the basic functioning of the mRNA vaccine as an antigen producing unit that remains in the deltoid.

Okay; can you link the studies? I'm not really able to parse your sentence. Antigen-producing unit isn't a standard term, and it's not clear to me how that would support an argument casting extreme doubt on the extreme functioning of an mRNA vaccine.

I have suspicion that mRNA is responsible for allergic generation issues (e.g. anecdotal bilateral hives after vaccination) but I have no evidence.

There have been some reports of adverse events in the skin as well, just less well reported on than the myocarditis.

I just know that mRNA spreads its antigen creating goodness throughout the body, at a frightenly common rate.

Can you provide citations for your claims? I'm not familiar with human data (if it exists), but in animal models the concentration is many orders of magnitude higher at the injection site and proximal lymph nodes. Very little makes it to distal tissues aside from the liver and spleen.

I am surprised you are unfamiliar with https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/, Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination.

I confess, I don't read every new issue of Clinical Research in Cardiology: official journal of the German Cardiac Society. I laud your scholarship, though. From the paper though:

Our study is limited by the relatively small cohort size and inherits the bias of an endpoint analysis. The nature of our autopsy study necessitates that the data are descriptive in quality and does not allow any epidemiological conclusions in terms of incidence or risk estimation.

Essentially, the baseline rate of myocarditis is 1-10/100,000 people per year. Germany administered 180,000,000 vaccines. Some fraction of people are going to die for unrelated reasons shortly after getting the vaccine, and some of them will have myocarditis. I'm also confused why their infectious PCR screening panel didn't include COVID; it's always possible some of the patients were infected prior to their vaccination.

All that said, it could be true. I personally can't think of anything to definitively refute it, but it's also not particularly compelling evidence by itself.

Yes, vaccines are supposed to enter your lymph and lymph node, but your lipid nanoparticle has different pharmacokinetics, and seems to pass the lymph nodes and enter your blood stream, whereas my J&J virus does not. This is a huge win for me, over your choice of vaccine. Let's see - deltoid goes to lymph vessel, lymph vessels carry mRNA to lymph node, some of the trillions of mRNA baubles awash past the lymph nodes and get dumped into venous circulation (right before entering the Right Atrium of the heart).

What data are you referencing?

The mRNA vaccine is found in breast milk: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2796427. mRNA enters the blood stream at a rate higher than other vaccines.

It's present in minute quantities barely above the limit of detection; several pg/ml. And it's not detectable after 48 hours. Or was your point just that some small amount of the mRNA vaccine can make it to the milk?

Spike protein is in blood stream of myocarditis patients. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/

That's interesting.

This is a horrible sign for your data, since I've seen the slides of lymphocyte aggregation in the deltoid of a cadaver, as well as in the heart of a cadaver after vaccination. What do you think of this discrepancy?

See above. When you vaccinate huge numbers of people, some fraction of them will die terribly in the next few days and look bad at autopsy. You need to look at population level analyses.

This is an 11 month old reddit post, the autopsies were not completed then. I think it makes your data look unusable. As a counter to the redditor - maybe this is CIA propaganda to make the vaccine seem safe, to counter Russians propaganda to make you think the vaccine can kill you (which the Germans actually proved was true). This was all in the reddit post you linked to - not an unrelated sneer.

The, uh, redditor is me. The usernames are the same.

Come on. None of those vaccines involve mRNA lipid nanoparticles. Getting boosted with mRNA to seek antibody titers is aboslutely not the same thing as getting a tetanus booster in 10 years.

You argued that boosters were risk without benefit once your 'immune naivete was broken.' This isn't true for COVID as the immunity wanes relatively quickly, and in analogous situations (tetanus, flu etc) where the immunity wanes we give boosters. It's not a comment on the relative safety profiles of the vaccines, or whether an annual mRNA booster is safer than an annual flu booster.

I mean this is a very very polite way - how did you find your way to the Motte?

My school has a big brother program for struggling students. My math tutor linked me to some blogs, but they were boring and I didn't understand a lot of what they were talking about. I like the Motte because the posts are (usually) shorter and easier to understand.

Yes, more evidence that the entry of a novel, circulating respiratory pathogen into the population that targets elderly and vulnerable is entirely normal, see the Russian Flu in the 1800s. What's not normal, is becoming a fanatic for biotechnology.

It killed a million people, and Spanish flu killed tens of millions. If that's our alternative, call me abnormal and sign me up for biotech.

Thinking now of the 2060 version of us looking at the first generation lipid nanoparticle mRNA that people took. Talk about prototype!

Well, of course. The same way we moved from random cowpox pus to live attenuated viruses to subunit vaccines to LNPs. There's problems with LNPs that, amusingly, you don't even reference here that people are working on solving. Absent singularity, 2060 will probably see us having progressed through another 2-3 generations of delivery vehicles.

The efficacy collapsed just like the mRNA vaccines, this is why you're on dose number 5, and defending data from dose number 3. You have introduced an entirely new set of dynamics to your immune system, one that those who receive conventional vaccines will not be exposed to. You have RNA transfective particles leaking into your blood stream, while I do not. Guess the fallacy does much better with actually winnable man made advancements in public health.

You're projecting your own partisanship onto me, my friend. You're acting like we're engaging in some antagonistic dick-measuring contest to see who can win an argument, you're upset, you feel the need to insinuate that I'm stupid or misrepresent my arguments to imply that I'm agreeing with you or just being ridiculous.

I can lay some cards on the table: my position is that the first two doses were warranted, somewhere around dose 3 the calculus definitely shifted for the young and healthy, and at this point I'm unsure of the benefit for anybody and skeptical of anyone claiming otherwise in either direction. The vaccines worked well initially, but the immunity waned rapidly, we didn't update them quickly enough to maintain efficacy and new COVID strains are less virulent all of which shifts the calculus. The safety profiles for mRNA vaccines seem overall quite strong but potentially contraindicated for some demographics - it's not clear to me whether the myocarditis, for example, is related to molecular mimicry with the spike protein or inherent to any LNP vaccine. I'm open to having my mind changed if someone shares reliable data. Based on this conversation, I'm skeptical that you are, though.

Thanks for the conversation, but I'm probably done after this. If you choose to do so, I'll read your reply, but I've got some other things to get back to.

Thanks. I read all your comments.

You are detecting partisanship, as well as someone who was mandated. This is a huge deal for me. I cannot thank you enough for engaging me, it's extremely difficult to find people to debunk my own thought etc. I think you make a lot of good points and it will help me moderate as I look forward to further evidence.

I think some developments are going to vindicate me in the future, and a lot of your objections are well placed to defuse my ability to make claims at this current time. Until then, I unfortunately am bubbling with some vitriol.

Opinions I cannot prove to you the way you'd like:

Covid is safer than they can possible report.

The vaccine is more dangerous than they can ever possibly report.

Maybe take a gander:

This study finds a 1 in 100,000 death rate for the vaccine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z

Thought it was interesting, if you have not yet seen. Thanks again and have a good one.