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I am going to do my best to write a post to follow up on last week's mRNA vaccine hypothetical. Last week, the idea of 25% of the population "dying" from the vaccine would have social consequences, and people discussed. I noticed a lot of in-the-weeds back and forth on the vaccines, and luckily, a paper came out today to establish a non-hypothetical.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22014931
I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease, but noticed that clotting incidences during Flu were never really elucidated or investigated. Science is a man made, bumbling golem. Blood clots in the lungs, according to my traditional reading of Physiology, would generally mean you can have blood clotting disorder anywhere you have blood. The Heart, The Brain, and the Lungs just have the worst, smallest pipes for these clots to be detected in.
A note about Covid being a clotty disease - covid blood clots are "amyloids" that cause "long covid" - then what are blood clots that appear during a flu sequalae? These probably have never been investigated or characterized. Covid is more clotty than flu - but are we considering that Covid causes severe sleepiness and lethargy? Do activity levels while infected affect blood clotting patterns during respiratory illness? (admittedly speculation - but have you ever taken a 16 hour plane flight? Look at this article about flu vaccines preventing blood clots, from 2008. They probably do - because all respiratory viruses increase chance of clotting? Well, that's fine, but I bet vaccines aren't supposed to cause clotting.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081109193332.htm
That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?
There has been some debate about the "naturalistic fallacy" in arguing that a Covid-19 infection can be characterized as less risky than receiving a Covid-19 vaccination. I keep encountering ostensibly "pro-vax" individuals who are claiming that getting myocarditis from the vaccine is a no brainer, if you are protected against myocarditis from Coronavirus. However, we have no clear mechanisms here, except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia. This type of myocarditis is not proving to be common at all with Covid-19 reinfections - I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken. If we had more traditional vaccines, perhaps an increased rate of myocarditis or blood clots near the lungs will be decreased, for a similar benefit. Why can't this be broached? Covaxin exists but was rejected by the FDA. The public health monolith seemed to block the chance to be "anti-vax" and win by scoring protection from the virus without being subject to a genetic-based biotechnology
We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me). This becomes true when infection reaches a tipping point and moves further than your lungs, but Omicron, combined with the fact that so many people have Natural and Artificial (oh sorry 2019 term - vaccine induced) Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).
It seems "pro-vax" are using some type of time fallacy that hasn't updated. What human is encountering SARS-2 with a naïve immune system in 2023? Why would you take a vaccine that can be compared to the risk getting your first exposure to a new group of coronaviruses in 2023? Then arguments can hit "we didn't know at the time," but this is extremely unsatisfying to people who had these exact suspicions during the vaccine drive, and got sick very early during the "it's just a flu" media push of Feb. 2020 (I was of course, masking in Feb. 2020, sigh).
Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.
Please come debate. I noticed more "pro-vax" on this board than usual - I'm ready for you. Let's be clear.
mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.
J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!
Novavax - this one does not rely on stable lipid nanoparticles, but involves a novel nanoparticle that helps arrange spike protein to look more like a "virus." This is important.
Covaxin - the FDA rejected this vaccine because the one's we had were so safe. This was the exact moment I sunk permenantly into my rabbit hole. The FDA and other public health stakeholders created some type of technology embargo against a traditional Covid vaccination methods. The reasons could be many, and I think are becoming deeply cultural, and I'm excited for the conversation we're about to have. Based on centuries old concepts of presenting antigens 'as they are' (insert latin term) rather than conjuring them at the ribosome in the cell, which has been of interest for less than a median human lifetime in the USA.
So in essence, rather than ask you what you think a 54% increase in Pulmonary Embolism incidence after Pfizer vaccination, I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted. If I have seemed at all to sneer or to be uncharitable, I apologize, and would be happy to reword. I wanted to put forward a spirited defense of "anti-mRNA vaxxery", not denigrate anyone on the other side.
It'd be a bit easier if you could summarize with some bullet points of the claims you're actually throwing down to be rebutted - it's a fairly long and meandering post.
Note that COVID has an RR of 2.2 for pulmonary embolism, the patient population for which is likely heterogeneous (vaccinated, unvaccinated, vaccinated + infection, etc). Does vaccination significantly reduce that number in such a way as to be net beneficial along this single axis? I'm not sure we could power that study, particularly now that everyone is some mess of vaccinated/infected/vaccinated + infected and we can't reliably differentiate them anymore. On the one hand, rates of PE are fairly high in hospitalized patients, who are the ones who would have most benefited from vaccines - on the other hand, the same study doesn't note much of a change in PE risk in hospitalized patients after vaccines became widely available. Moreover, the slow pace of updating the vaccines combined with decreases in COVID virulence make the calculus very difficult in whether the vaccines even provide significant benefit at this point - a point being reported on in the MSM.
Note also that the major caveat of the paper you link is that they're forced to compare to historical data, so we're effectively comparing PE rates in two historical periods - one of which saw the emergence of a major new respiratory virus causing PE! From the paper you linked:
Also:
Be careful drawing facile conclusions from large correlational studies like this. And not to be a paternalistic douchebag (feel free to ignore if you know better) but you might find it helpful to skim the discussion of a paper if you aren't familiar with the field to at least get a feel for the limitations or alternative explanations of the study.
There's plenty of papers: Here's a review that will have a summary and a couple dozen primary references if you're interested. Many primary papers investigating the mechanisms as well.
What study are you referencing? The last time I looked into myocarditis it was vanishingly rare, a tiny number of deaths were attributable to it and those individuals seemed to have many other medical conditions. Usually sudden death after vaccination would be related to anaphylaxis due to an allergy to some vaccine component, whereas the myocarditis takes a few days to develop.
As well say this for tetanus, flu, rabies or any of the other viruses we need boosters for. Immunity wanes particularly quickly for respiratory viruses. Note also that the Moderna booster is a half dose, so modulo some weird memory effects likely has lower rates of adverse events.
I don't think we know the risk of myocarditis after reinfection; it's almost certainly lower, but I could only find two case reports so it's difficult to draw any conclusions or calculate the relative benefit of vaccination. Moreover, tens of thousands of elderly patients die of flu every year, and I can guarantee you that they aren't immunologically naive. Natural immunity isn't a silver bullet.
I'm not sure I understand your point here.
It's true. It does seem like COVID is progressing towards being 'just another virus' that people get repeatedly during flu season and we've watched in real time the emergence of a new 'cold' virus. I'd argue it's the first time we've watched this happen with modern technology (HIV and seasonal flu strains being related, but distinct in my opinion). None of this precludes a hyper-pathological variant cropping up next year, but I suppose I'd bet against it.
That being said, we've been infected by influenza for at least 1,500 years and it's still a major public health concern. A truly protective vaccine would be a major coup, and investing resources in these problems is worthwhile even if lockdowns and mask mandates are not.
The calculus for the vaccines was just much better early in the pandemic. Who cares about PE; it's vanishingly rare. Even in your study of nursing home patients only 10,000 out of 25,000,000 had a PE, an with a fatality rate of 5% (probably needs to be adjusted upwards for the elderly population) that's 500 deaths, with maybe 100-200 of those attributable to vaccination (see caveats above). Now do the math for deaths in that population if they had all been unvaccinated and exposed to COVID.
How do you think conventional vaccines make it to your lymph nodes? Both mRNA and conventional vaccines transit from the site of vaccination to your lymphoid organs via blood/lymph.
The centuries of science around conventional vaccines in the ages before we knew what B/T cells were probably don't count for much, and I doubt the live cowpox vaccines that you'd prefer had fantastic safety profiles. The fact that you need tens of millions of doses of vaccine to maybe tease out a signal of a potential side effect is, by and large, a very good safety profile.
It was pulled because both the safety profile and efficacy were worse. And of course it's a fallacy, on par with people have always dumped raw sewage in the Thames and cholera is just a fact of life. There's strong data that the mRNA-vaccines are safer and better than J&J or other non-mRNA vaccines developed abroad, unless you put a huge premium on living 'naturally.'
I'm out of characters, but note that antigens are also 'conjured' at the ribosome with your viral vectors.
(2/2)
Again, lymph vessels are more like one way valves. Yes, mRNA "pre-vaccine," and conventional "already-completed and molecularly confirmed" vaccine, are moved into your blood stream. Why are you bragging that unconverted genetic material gets a lift in the blood stream? That is aboslutley not the goal here. Lymphatic absorption is what we're dealing with.
Extremely anachronistic view of medical science. Dodges the gap in genomics that these vaccines depend on. Thinking now of the 2060 version of us looking at the first generation lipid nanoparticle mRNA that people took. Talk about prototype!
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.
My final statement: mRNA leaks into blood stream, J&J does not. This is a problem beyond the normal vein of risk-benefit analysis. This is malfunction analysis.
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