Prof Noakes appears to be going down the Fat Emperor black hole of misinformation

(Edith) #21

Hi Richard,

I read an article in the Washington Post a few days ago about the fact that the effectiveness of the vaccination starts to decrease over time:

“This action coincided with the release of a paper by executives from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer reporting that its coronavirus vaccine had strong but slightly diminished effectiveness six months after inoculation.”

The vaccines we received as children to mumps, measles, etc, were from weakened or dead viruses. The effectiveness of those vaccines seems to last many years. Does the waning effectiveness of the Covid vaccines have anything to do with the fact that they are mRNA vaccines? Any direction you could point me in to find information about this?

(Bob M) #22

I started listening to This Week in Virology just after the pandemic started. Way back when, they had a virologist researcher from MIT on there. He had looked at cross-reactivity between sars-cov2 and the common cold coronaviruses, using frozen blood samples taken pre-covid. He determined there was cross-reactivity.

They asked him if he thought the cross-reactivity was a benefit. He said he thought so, but he did not know and basically could not know without additional tests. (Note: some of the common cold coronaviruses did not have cross-reactivity, and some did.) He even said there could be a detriment.

So, a person from MIT whose job it is to do testing in virology did not know what benefit (or even a detriment) was conferred by this cross-reactivity. Yet one argument I saw back then, by many, was that this cross-reactivity meant many had some or a lot of immunity against sars-cov2, and thus sars-cov2 was not that bad.

But when they jump to conclusions when the data is really not there one way or another, I have to ask myself whether the do that in their other areas of “expertise”. The problem is that I don’t have the time to re-analyze everything they say.

Consequently, if someone brings up covid, I stop following them. On Twitter, I “mute” them. At some point if they get back to non-covid stuff, maybe I’ll revisit what they are saying. But I’ll have to analyze at least some of what they are saying to see if I think it’s true or not.

(Bob M) #23

The answer to this is complex. For instance, they only had either 3 or 4 weeks for the second dose. One theory, as indicated by the UK, is that waiting longer for the second dose causes better immunity. That is, the UK prioritized first doses, and many second doses where given much longer than the 3-4 week time frame.

The other thing to consider is the data is really not consistent for this. Some data seems to indicate waning, at least as per the Delta variant, but still the number of people who get really sick who have been vaccinated is very small. That’s what a vaccine is supposed to do – prevent a high degree of sickness. It’s not supposed to prevent any sickness.

Theoretically, the mRNA should give the body a good representation of the spike protein, and therefore a good representation of a real virus. We should have a long-lasting effect.

Now, there is some evidence emerging that a combination of two different types of vaccine might be better than one. But these are all epi-based, not RCT, I believe.

(PJ) #24

Ketogenic eating vs. unrelated medical stuff in which immense political issues are involved… they’re just totally different topics.

I have learned to let people disagree with me on some topics without it making me judge them on every other topic or area. The former is not a good road. People shouldn’t have to share your brain on every topic in order to be worthy on some of them.

(Richard Morris) #25

I suspect if you got infected, recovered, then vaccinated and then locked yourself away in a hermetically sealed room the neutralizing immunity which is what stops you getting infected would wane over a year, and your memory b-cell immunity that takes a few days to spin up would then persist. If you were then infected a decade late you’d probably be sick for a few days until that remembered immunity profile was spun up into a neutralizing response.

But once this virus becomes endemic we’ll all get regular exposures to keep neutralizing immunity permanently elevated. People who have recovered and been vaccinated probably have the best chance of not even noticing a reinfection. People who have immunity to the spike but not the virus (never infected but vaccinated) probably have a milder disease first time around and then they’ll probably have the same hybrid immunity.

But this is not my field so I may not know what I don’t know about it.

(Richard Morris) #26

yes. I am qualified to know that immunology and virology are neither his field nor mine.

(Richard Morris) #27

Yes we don’t know what we don’t know about other fields.

The last person who was apparently equally well educated across all fields in science died in 1829.

(Richard Morris) #28

Yes that has been my problem too. I have been forced to re-analyze the body of work of several people who made nutrition claims that suited my biases, when I suddenly realized with respect to this pandemic they were leaping to conclusions unsupported by data, and then changing the goal posts behind them as the facts on the ground diverged from their predictions.

The whole thing has me so depressed that it has driven me to watching vegan propaganda youtubes to see if there is anything they know about nutrition and metabolism that I somehow missed.

BTW I also listen to TWIV and Dr John Campbell but also Bret Weinstein and while I don’t agree with all of the views expressed they are all worth listening to with respect to their fields which are respectively Virology, Public Health and Evolutionary biology.

(Todd Allen) #29

I recently joined Twitter and have been following Tim Noakes too. I cringed when I saw the “Fauci indited” retweet. I hope Tim regrets that one, but I don’t much hold it against him. Twitter is chock full of stupid nasty tweets and Tim has been subjected to quite a few of them. It’s a recipe for losing ones cool, not doing due diligence and firing back with anything one hopes might be true.

Personally I am grateful Tim, Ivor and numerous others from the keto and carnivore communities are out there raising serious concerns regarding responses to the pandemic by governments, mainstream media, big pharma and the gate keepers of internet discourse. Here is an open letter from UK doctors that thoughtfully speaks to some of this, just published yesterday and rapidly gaining additional signatures. I was pleased to see Dr. Malcolm Kendrick among them.
https://www.covid19assembly.org/doctors-open-letter/

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #30

I was hoping for a shred more hope from you Richard, but this is exactly where I’m at.

I’ve often said on these forums, in various formulations, that the Pareto Principle explains a lot of why vegans and keto folks may experience similar good results: removing sugar and processed foods (mostly processed carbs) from the diet will give you pretty good results regardless. Gary Taubes was driven to write his book about sugar for precisely this reason.

My diet varies between strict ketogenic and lazy keto, and I’m happy with it, but I will continue keeping an open mind about my macro mix.

Regarding whether or not Professor Noakes or various chemical engineers on Twitter are to be taken seriously on areas of science outside of their expertise, I think the approving retweets of bizarre and uber-dubious sources speaks volumes. The screenshots above tell a story that ought to speak for itself. I don’t know what to tell people who can’t see that retweeting “Fauci indited (sic)” with a ridiculous video is terrifyingly QAnon-y. For those who can see this, perhaps you’ll understand why I’m now questioning everything these folks have ever said. Which is very depressing.

(Todd Allen) #31

Vaccines have had a wide range of effects. For instance the smallpox vaccines blocked infection so strongly that the virus was eradicated while flu vaccines have had little impact on the prevalence of the flu and annual death rates can still be quite high. A particularly concerning case is Marek’s in chickens. This was a disease with bad symptoms but low mortality. The Marek’s vaccine was nearly 100% effective in blocking symptoms but similar to the covid-19 vaccines wasn’t that effective at blocking infection. Commercial chicken operations achieved nearly a 100% vaccination rate and the virus spread through them without the evolutionary pressure to become milder. Normally when a mutation pops up that makes a virus more deadly it doesn’t spread as well since the virus dies with the host. But with symptoms blocked in the vaccinated the virus evolved to become super transmissible and super deadly. It is now 100% fatal in the unvaccinated. Something pretty much impossible to have evolved naturally without the help of a massive vaccination effort.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #32

Sounds scary, until you realise that the people who know about human vaccinology and virology aren’t at all worried about anything like this happening with Covid. Eg https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777785

So this is kind of classic misinformation, Todd. What you’ve written takes a nugget of truth, packages it in anecdote, and analogises it to Covid. I find it troubling.

#33

So because he’s smart enough to think people with antibodies shouldn’t be injected with experimental vaccines that’s “misinformation”?. That what you’re saying?

(bulkbiker) #34

I’m guessing you mean "some people " as there are plenty of other who know as much who have different opinions?

(Richard Morris) #35

It’s just a rule of thumb that viruses evolve to become less deadly and more virulent over time. Viruses that manage to become endemic generally do become less deadly and more virulent when you look back in time because the historical observer is selecting for viruses that didn’t kill their hosts and go extinct.

But here is the thing - Mutation is stochastic. There is nothing stopping an endemic virus today from suddenly developing a lethal phenotype. Influenza has been endemic in our species since before modern humans existed, then the Spanish influenza shows up in 1918 and kills 20 million of us.

We can look back and say well that virus was an evolutionary dead end because it killed it’s hosts, but there are 20 million reasons why we should not rely upon that being a rule for predicting the lethality of any future viral pathogen.

There is recent literature in Marek’s disease showing that the mechanism of action of the vaccine to reduce symptoms reduces transmission in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated birds. Flock immunity if you will.

“Consequently, contact (unvaccinated) birds are less likely to develop disease symptoms or die, show less severe symptoms, and shed less infectious virus themselves, when infected by vaccinated birds. These results highlight that even partial vaccination with a leaky vaccine can have unforeseen positive consequences in controlling the spread and symptoms of disease.”

Mind you the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines are not especially leaky, or I should say no vaccines are 100% neutralizing but these are pretty good. If you go back to March 2020 when the first human test of the pfizer vaccine started the FDA was prepared to approve vaccine that was 50% effective … and we created multiple that are 95%+ effective. They are about as close to non-leaky as any vaccines have been.

Neutralizing protection is very strong but wanes over time as the immune response shifts to memory b-cells which remains a strong but delayed response. It just means that a reinfection results in a milder case as it takes a few days for the immune response to get back into top gear. And if we want to keep neutralizing response while viral transmission in the community is high, so we can try to avoid any disease, then a booster shot does that.

(bulkbiker) #36

Which is great news for the vaccines sceptics but less so for the jabbed?

(Alec) #37

Thomas Young?

(Richard Morris) #38

Welcome to herd (or flock) immunity. Where game theoretically it is to your advantage for all your neighbors to take the small but non-zero risk of a vaccine while you pretend to take it.

Mind you when there is a local outbreak and you are hoping all your neighbors will go into lockdown to protect the unvaccinated, they may not be willing to reciprocate if they are fully vaccinated and only risk a small but non-zero risk of disease.

(Richard Morris) #39

The guy who proved Newton wrong about the particle nature of light. And deciphered the Rosetta stone. Yes the last generic scientist.

(bulkbiker) #40

I have never requested anyone do anything to protect me.

And certainly would never request they “lockdown” in order to do so as it’s a relatively pointless exercise as Australia is slowly discovering.

As for murdering dogs and shooting rubber bullets at their citizens to “protect the population” from a not especially dangerous infection…

Well the mind boggles… and those that support it appear to be either brainwashed or fascistic in the extreme.