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Notes -
Twitter Files 12 and 13
My apologies for not posting about these earlier. So I thought I'd wrap both new releases up in one post.
12: Link
13: Link
12 is by Taibbi and tied deeply to release 11. He writes the following.
Twitter was flooded by requests from US intelligence agencies in 2020, to the point they couldn't keep clear who was sending what and what was supposed to be acted upon.
A new entrant, the Global Engagement Center (part of the State Dept.) was also trying to get into these discussions and calls between social media platforms and intelligence agencies.
This, however, was not taken well. Yoel Roth defended the work with the DHS and FBI, seeing them as trustworthy, but Twitter's officials were hesitant to let the GEC enter the conversation (there is an emphasis on this being retroactive, the GEC is said to be trying to get in as if they had always been there) and the reason might have to do with Twitter's perception of GEC as "Trumpy".
Call it turf wars, call it the Deep State, but the end result was that the FBI advocated for and ultimately won the right to be one of two pipelines to Twitter along with the DHS - all others would only be on the industry calls.
There's also more about the strategy being used by researchers and intelligence agencies (including the GEC) where they went public before consulting with Twitter over any list of provided accounts.
13 is by Alex Berenson. This one is super short and just covers how weak Scott Gottlieb's requests to get some Covid-related accounts suspended were. Gottlieb is one of Pfizer's board members, and Alex very much accuses him of being financially motivated in requesting that certain tweets and accounts get removed, including Berenson's own.
Overall, 12 was more substantial and engaging, though mostly a repeat of 11. 13 was a bit newer, but I'm not quite sure if I trust Berenson's summarization of the medical research being that natural immunity is better than vaccination.
Berenson summary of the research isn’t the key part in 12. The key part is it was an official person once again trying to silence debate by in this case a medical expert in the field. And then using some dumb “violence” as justification for not allowing people to discuss the issue because apparently he received one anonymous twitter death threat. The issue is censorship.
I agree with Berenson that Gottlieb's attempts at removing Covid-related accounts and tweets was wrong and censorious, I'm just making a point about what I think about his position itself.
Fwiw I think infection as good as being vaxxed both fits with historic immunology and seems to have enough data on COVID. I think berenson extrapolates too much. But the actual health data seems only part of the story.
Also very interesting that the greatest engineer of our generation and by seemingly a huge margin supports Berenson. (We can perhaps debate musks as greatest engineer but he’s good at that and combines it with hype and managerial competency).
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While you do see medical research occasionally indicating the obverse, it's usually pretty bad and/or conducted by actors with pretty obvious motivations in the 'pushing vaccines' department. (looking at you, CDC)
He's almost certainly correct though:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(22)00287-7/fulltext
No vax booster has ever been able to explain to me what the proposed mechanism is for exposure by blood to a small subunit of the virus providing better immunity than exposure by mucous membranes to the whole actual thing; this makes no sense whatsoever when you think about it. Of course there could still be reasons why the vaccine is preferable, in the event that it actually prevented infection -- but to me the fact that hardly anyone was officially prepared to draw this distinction is evidence in the direction of general intellectual dishonesty in the (mostly North American I guess) public health community.
One possible intuition for the reverse seems pretty straightforward: the full virus contains countermeasures against the immune system; the vaccine does not (and has a stabilized version of the spike to make sure it's visible to the immune system). On blood vs. mucus membranes, there's research into nasal vaccines, but there's yet to be one that actually shows better protection from severe disease, possibly because the protection from infection just will never be that great because of the way coronaviruses and the human immune system interact and severe disease happens when the virus gets into more into the blood/internal organs.
That's less a proposed mechanism and more the fragment of one. You'd need to connect this to a feature of coronaviruses, which from what I can tell behave in a very textbook way. They're not HIV, for instance.
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Countermeasures against the immune system developing antibodies to it? I'm pretty sure it doesn't; that's kind of the whole point of the immune system. It trains itself to do pattern recognition on foreign objects that have made their way into the body -- having the whole object available for this training seems intrinsically better (or at least just as good) than having only a small part. (which is of course subject to constant mutation)
An actual infection tends to do both, however -- so one might think that it would be the best of both worlds in terms of protection.
A countermeasure is perfectly doable, for example epigenetic/signaletic alterations of the infected cells to overexpress immunosuppressive proteins such as, IDO, phosphatidylserine, PD-1, or some anti inflammatory Interleukins.
However I don't think COVID does that but it's definitely something a future pandemic could do and is something key to cancer cells survival.
There is also the topic of anti-antibodies but I don't know enough about that one.
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And countering the immune system is kind of the whole point of viruses. All viruses have countermeasures against the immune system of some sort. At least, all viruses fit enough for us to notice them, otherwise the immune system would do its job well enough we would never observe them. These countermeasures include hiding the proteins from the immune system that would be the most effective targets for antibodies, which is why we have spike-only vaccines for COVID and why we have to get a new flu vaccine every year (trying to get the immune system to pay attention to the right proteins on the flu virus is an open area of research). The implementation is different but both viruses trick the immune system into primarily targeting the wrong part of the virus. (Viruses can also have more involved countermeasures like taking on shapes close enough to things that are supposed to be in humans that the immune system has trouble targeting them and more directly interfering with the immune system functioning.)
I don't know if this is sufficient to cause the COVID vaccines to provide better immunity than a prior infection, just that it's not a priori obvious without doing the studies.
Yeah, that suggests the research towards doing some of the vaccine doses as shots and some as nasal spray might result in a better vaccine. No results yet... but no one seems to be funding vaccine research very heavily since the initial vaccines were released.
None of this suggests that we would a priori assume that covid (pretty standard yet novel in the particulars coronavirus) infection should provide weaker immunity than the totally novel subunit vaccines -- so shouldn't it require that really clear and conclusive research indicating that this is in fact the case be needed in order to justify treating prior infection any differently than vaccination in terms of restrictions etc?
Once you're talking about things like how we should handle restrictions, you run straight into the problem that it's way easier to have documentation on who has been vaccinated and when than who has been infected and when. IIRC, in Europe restrictions based on vaccination or recent infection did exist in some places. The US does have checks of vaccination or prior infection for some diseases... well, at least chickenpox, not sure of any others, but that's partially because prior infection is a contraindication for that vaccine.
This is total bullshit promoted (mostly) by lazy statists (presuming you are not one of these) -- antibody tests which prove infection do in fact exist, as did testing stations which could just as easily report test results to the relevant authorities as vaccination stations report vaccine status.
Anyways, "it would be inconvenient" is not much of a justification for measures which (absent a reasonable belief that individuals are dangerous to society at large) are clear violations of civil rights -- getting a search warrant is frequently inconvenient for cops, it doesn't mean that they are allowed to bust down doors whenever they feel like it.
So clearly it's not impossible, or even inconvenient to the point where we can't manage it...
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Also - don't forget that development of inactivated vaccines seems to have been halted in its tracks, and Covaxin rejected by the FDA because "we have vaccines already."
Of course, the market would prefer a vaccine that is 100 times safer than mRNA style, but the FDA helped embargo any protein vaccines.
I literally think the FDA blocked conventional vaccines, to make sure no "anti-vaxxer" could score a win by being hesitant until a better vaccine is available - a total cluster for people trying to paint anti-vax as anti science, if they line up to accept a conventional vaccine. Will they now? Probably not.
I don’t agree with your thesis. To me, appalling behavior by the FDA points to lobbyists and political pressure. Which would also explain them approving JJ and Pfizer but not AZ.
Fair, and yet here we are, 1/11/2023, and somehow there is disinterest in important Covaxin to increase the vaccination rate. All because they can't say "we have the real ones now."
Have you seen booster update? pitiful. This is the future for mRNA when held in a free and open market next to protein-adjuvanted vaccines.
Yes, the FDA doesn’t want Pfizer to have competition.
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