"The [Lancet] study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals."
As always when it comes to vaccine fear-mongering, the Lancet study paints a non-alarming picture. The conclusion seems to be that a booster is required after around 9 months, which is what everyone and their mother worth listening to have been saying for the past year.
Super important to note that this is vaccine effectiveness against infection. It does not address the effectiveness of vaccines to prevent hospitalization or death.
The picture it paints is, in fact, alarming. Unfortunately with vaccine studies you can't simply read the last sentences of the abstract and assume that what it says is correct. Vaccine studies simply don't get published if they don't recommend vaccination, which leads to the curious phenomenon of papers that contain data indicating serious problems yet which recommend more shots anyway. You have to discard their advice and just look at the data. This paper is a good case in point.
What does their data actually show? Look at figure 2. It shows smoothly and steadily declining effectiveness that drops below zero. There is no change in the trend near the 9 month mark. How far can effectiveness actually fall? This paper stops looking after 9 months, but we know from UK data that it can in fact keep falling for much longer than that. Before they stopped reporting the numbers measured effectiveness in the UK was around -300%:
Additionally case rates in the boosted were higher than in unvaccinated at that point, i.e. by March 2022 COVID had become a pandemic of the vaccinated. Boosting had helped for such a short period it hardly mattered and then the problem became even worse.
Note that you have to be careful with effectiveness figures reported by public health authorities. Starting with COVID many of them began reporting "adjusted" effectiveness in addition to or entirely instead of case rates, but their adjustment methodology isn't valid.
So this is not vaccine "fear mongering". It's what government's own data shows. That makes it a very real problem that needs serious and immediate research to figure out (a) why this is happening, (b) what if anything can be done about it. The vaccines appear to have backfired and we're very lucky that Omicron is so mild. Unfortunately this will not be admitted to in the media, by governments, and not openly by researchers.
The original almost implies "immune response" overall, as in, against all other diseases/infections. That's a misinterpretation/misrepresentation, right?
From what I could tell the The Lancet article is only talking about waning effectiveness against Covid (as previously known). [Table 1 possibly notwithstanding, but I'm reading this as people with co-morbidities are more likely to get the vaccine, not the other direction...]
I am so confused about this. The linked Lancet study seems to make the opposite claim, as far as I can tell. Furthermore, the Lancet study seems to be specifically focused on COVID vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19, whereas the quote makes it sound like the study showed a general decrease in immune function among the vaccinated.
Am I missing something here, or is Kenji Yamamoto's paper completely fraudulent?
Look at figure 2 in the Lancet study. Seems to be making that claim indeed.
As for immune function, the phrasing isn't as precise as it could be but he's paraphrasing a cited study so does it have to be? There's lots of fraud in science but that word should be reserved for things that justify it, like made up data, misrepresenting your own data, motivated reasoning etc. Assuming the reader will understand what's meant based on context, especially when the cited study can be easily loaded, doesn't rise to the level of fraud.
Thank you. That helps me to view the author's paraphrasing in a more charitable light. "Fraudulent" may have been too strong of a word. I still find it misleading to paraphrase a study in a way that is different from its main conclusion. We don't know what data concerns, etc. the study authors may have had such that they did not explicitly reach this conclusion. And the imprecision in Yamamoto's wording seems intended to mislead as well.
This is an interesting area of study and I'm sure a different author would make a more persuasive case for/against this effect being real.
If you aren't familiar with vaccine research then citing a paper whilst contradicting its conclusion may look odd or malicious, but it's not. Vaccine papers are quite "special". The problem is that scientific journals simply will not publish any paper on vaccines that doesn't praise them, regardless of merit or data. This pattern is extremely consistent.
So when someone is making an argument that isn't 100% pro-vaccine, and they cite a paper, what they mean is ignore the commentary, look at the data. They may not bother spelling this out explicitly because you get used to it so fast and then can easily forget that many people won't actually read the paper, they'll just look at the abstract and assume it's honest.
In this case their argument for boosters is simply that effectiveness keeps dropping, so everyone should take boosters. There isn't anything deeper, and obviously such an argument is facile in the extreme.
And, if you actually read the Lancet study and understand statistical estimates, it is clear that the Lancet study does not say this at all. There is no mention of long-term immune depression in the abstract, because there is no statistically significant support for that conclusion. After 8 months, the line they show does go below zero (suggesting more infections in vaccinated people) but the error bars include zero, supporting the more sensible conclusion that at some point, the vaccine is not effective. But there is no evidence that the vaccine actually raises risk, which is the argument proposed.
Fear was used to push the masses to the vaccine. Discussing the results of a suppressed study that goes against media messaging is not jumping on a fear train.
> The media have so far concealed the adverse events of vaccine administration, such as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), owing to biased propaganda.
This statement seems completely unnecessary when discussing the vaccine effects based on scientific evidence. Only ends up casting a doubt on the motivations of the author.
Well, the mainstream media certainly has not exaggerated the adverse events. If you know something is definitely not exaggerated, the distribution falls between “perfectly accurate” and “downplayed”. My money is on some level of “downplayed” being correct.
I am fascinated with learning about the process of deciding what topics are on the approved list for the discussion. Short 6 months ago, this is not something that people would be encouraged to discuss publicly. I am getting the sense that everybody is going by the main stream media rules. But how does the main stream media itself decide what is allowed at any given time? Does somebody actually calls around all the editors or is there some sort of social norm propagation because everybody knows everybody? Does anybody have insights into the actual process?
Here at HN? Who knows. It depends how aggressively things get flagged. There isn't some approved list of topics.
For the media, it seems they will generally not report on anything that makes academia or public health look bad. Why is that, probably a mix of pragmatism and ideology. Journalists have become heavily dependent on academics to give more or less any story a patina of "expert" authority, often on short notice. They cannot /will not bite the hand that feeds them. As for why they won't criticize public health - progressivists have built into their own identity that the state is basically good, basically competent and public health organizations are a great source of abstract progress. To admit that things they did have gone badly wrong would undermine their whole worldview. If you work for the NYT you don't become a libertarian overnight, especially because journalists who did work there and reported on the public health negatively got fired (e.g. Berenson, Wade...).
Have you heard of the Trusted News Initiative? [1]
>Who is involved?
>Core partners in the TNI are: AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post.
So that sounds nice from a project management perspective, but it's to ensure that only the same message is being disseminated, and "incorrect" messaging to be limited or stopped. And then you see one of Pfizer's directors [2] sits on the same board as Reuters, which is part of this program.
So there is a clear financial incentive there to either suppress or to limit/police information contrary to "vaccinate or die/you're a bad person". That's why so much research about ivermectin or vitamin D has been either suppressed or outright smeared. Like that week when every NBC or CNN or MSNBC channel ran the "Joe Rogan ate horse paste!" story. Well, no, actually a doctor in Texas prescribed him a WHO essential medicine that might have helped, but was safe to try. And the decision should be between him and his doctor. And then the CDC ran all these articles about "don't take horse medicine!" as a way to smear alternative medicine-interested as idiots with a deathwish. For shame that our government-funded agencies would do this.
Never before in the US have I seen such gaslighting, smearing, lies, corruption, mind control, and deprivation of rights (via vaccine passports in my county). All the Russians I know says this all reminds them deeply of the Soviet period. But Americans are so keen to trust authority, and not to know to be suspicious of it. We knew from January 2021 that the "vaccine" doesn't prevent infection, but it's still being treated as such. It is not a traditional vaccine; it is a prophylactic medication to limit risk of death for 6 or 7 months. Even calling this a "vaccine" is a linguistic trojan horse, because it's _not_; the CDC's very definition of "vaccine" was changed [3], just so they could shoehorn this product into that category and bring record profits to Moderna and Pfizer.
The next two or three years' of lawsuits are going to be _very_ interesting.
I can confirm that in the Russian-American community there is a lot of talk about how western governments now using same tactics that were used by the USSR government.
I'd like to hear more about this or get their take. Maybe if I could gather some interviews it'd be easier to get the word out about what's been going on. But most people don't care, and will keep getting jabbed without thinking twice.
From my reading it seems to have a number of unexplained leaps of logic allowing its conclusion to be supported. But it seems like it’s reasonable to do post mortem analysis and understand any possible downsides. The key for me is that mRNA has such potential it would be absurd to not analyze the massive natural experiment on the technology. But this review isn’t convincing of there being a problem and there’s lots of “and after COVID shots we saw X happen” with nothing really indicating a causal relationship. The incident rates being discussed of potential issues are in single digit individuals, which doesn’t concern me given the number of vaccine recipients, but seems reasonable to keep your eye out for.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] thread"The [Lancet] study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals."
The Lancet article is worth a read.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What does their data actually show? Look at figure 2. It shows smoothly and steadily declining effectiveness that drops below zero. There is no change in the trend near the 9 month mark. How far can effectiveness actually fall? This paper stops looking after 9 months, but we know from UK data that it can in fact keep falling for much longer than that. Before they stopped reporting the numbers measured effectiveness in the UK was around -300%:
https://dailysceptic.org/archive/vaccine-effectiveness-hits-...
Additionally case rates in the boosted were higher than in unvaccinated at that point, i.e. by March 2022 COVID had become a pandemic of the vaccinated. Boosting had helped for such a short period it hardly mattered and then the problem became even worse.
Note that you have to be careful with effectiveness figures reported by public health authorities. Starting with COVID many of them began reporting "adjusted" effectiveness in addition to or entirely instead of case rates, but their adjustment methodology isn't valid.
So this is not vaccine "fear mongering". It's what government's own data shows. That makes it a very real problem that needs serious and immediate research to figure out (a) why this is happening, (b) what if anything can be done about it. The vaccines appear to have backfired and we're very lucky that Omicron is so mild. Unfortunately this will not be admitted to in the media, by governments, and not openly by researchers.
From what I could tell the The Lancet article is only talking about waning effectiveness against Covid (as previously known). [Table 1 possibly notwithstanding, but I'm reading this as people with co-morbidities are more likely to get the vaccine, not the other direction...]
Am I missing something here, or is Kenji Yamamoto's paper completely fraudulent?
As for immune function, the phrasing isn't as precise as it could be but he's paraphrasing a cited study so does it have to be? There's lots of fraud in science but that word should be reserved for things that justify it, like made up data, misrepresenting your own data, motivated reasoning etc. Assuming the reader will understand what's meant based on context, especially when the cited study can be easily loaded, doesn't rise to the level of fraud.
This is an interesting area of study and I'm sure a different author would make a more persuasive case for/against this effect being real.
So when someone is making an argument that isn't 100% pro-vaccine, and they cite a paper, what they mean is ignore the commentary, look at the data. They may not bother spelling this out explicitly because you get used to it so fast and then can easily forget that many people won't actually read the paper, they'll just look at the abstract and assume it's honest.
In this case their argument for boosters is simply that effectiveness keeps dropping, so everyone should take boosters. There isn't anything deeper, and obviously such an argument is facile in the extreme.
This statement seems completely unnecessary when discussing the vaccine effects based on scientific evidence. Only ends up casting a doubt on the motivations of the author.
For the media, it seems they will generally not report on anything that makes academia or public health look bad. Why is that, probably a mix of pragmatism and ideology. Journalists have become heavily dependent on academics to give more or less any story a patina of "expert" authority, often on short notice. They cannot /will not bite the hand that feeds them. As for why they won't criticize public health - progressivists have built into their own identity that the state is basically good, basically competent and public health organizations are a great source of abstract progress. To admit that things they did have gone badly wrong would undermine their whole worldview. If you work for the NYT you don't become a libertarian overnight, especially because journalists who did work there and reported on the public health negatively got fired (e.g. Berenson, Wade...).
So that sounds nice from a project management perspective, but it's to ensure that only the same message is being disseminated, and "incorrect" messaging to be limited or stopped. And then you see one of Pfizer's directors [2] sits on the same board as Reuters, which is part of this program.
So there is a clear financial incentive there to either suppress or to limit/police information contrary to "vaccinate or die/you're a bad person". That's why so much research about ivermectin or vitamin D has been either suppressed or outright smeared. Like that week when every NBC or CNN or MSNBC channel ran the "Joe Rogan ate horse paste!" story. Well, no, actually a doctor in Texas prescribed him a WHO essential medicine that might have helped, but was safe to try. And the decision should be between him and his doctor. And then the CDC ran all these articles about "don't take horse medicine!" as a way to smear alternative medicine-interested as idiots with a deathwish. For shame that our government-funded agencies would do this.
Never before in the US have I seen such gaslighting, smearing, lies, corruption, mind control, and deprivation of rights (via vaccine passports in my county). All the Russians I know says this all reminds them deeply of the Soviet period. But Americans are so keen to trust authority, and not to know to be suspicious of it. We knew from January 2021 that the "vaccine" doesn't prevent infection, but it's still being treated as such. It is not a traditional vaccine; it is a prophylactic medication to limit risk of death for 6 or 7 months. Even calling this a "vaccine" is a linguistic trojan horse, because it's _not_; the CDC's very definition of "vaccine" was changed [3], just so they could shoehorn this product into that category and bring record profits to Moderna and Pfizer.
The next two or three years' of lawsuits are going to be _very_ interesting.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative... [2]: https://www.pfizer.com/people/leadership/board_of_directors/... [3]: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s12985...
From my reading it seems to have a number of unexplained leaps of logic allowing its conclusion to be supported. But it seems like it’s reasonable to do post mortem analysis and understand any possible downsides. The key for me is that mRNA has such potential it would be absurd to not analyze the massive natural experiment on the technology. But this review isn’t convincing of there being a problem and there’s lots of “and after COVID shots we saw X happen” with nothing really indicating a causal relationship. The incident rates being discussed of potential issues are in single digit individuals, which doesn’t concern me given the number of vaccine recipients, but seems reasonable to keep your eye out for.