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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.
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.
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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