14 Comments
Dec 13, 2021Liked by AlmostWrong

"Hopefully others will see what we can see before the virus becomes unstoppable through acquiring fitness it would gain in 900 billion infections over 1000 years within a span of a few months if we start boosting children 0-4 with non-sterilizing vaccines which is inevitable given China has already done it to 3 year olds and India has announced 2-18 year olds."

Horrifying on every level.

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"You may have heard from many who noticed that susceptibility is higher after the first dose of vaccination for a few weeks.

I want to show you that the assumption that the first dose is related to susceptibility is a kind of association fallacy or bias and instead one may susceptible for more complicated reasons than just that, and that a second dose doesn’t make anyone less susceptible than first dose but timing and condition of recipient might matter. In this UK care home study, 87.5% of the infections in the vaccinated happened after second dose but within 14 days, so not counted as vaccinated."

Let me check double-check that I understand the claim (hypothesis) that you are making. As I understand it, your premise is that people are more susceptible to infection after the virus immediately after each dose (than they were immediately before the dose). Correct so far? That is actually an easy hypothesis to validate with causal significance if we only had a modicum of granular-enough data... which we do not have. The people that have the data seem unwilling or incapable of doing that.. or maybe both. Unclear.

I have long suspected this is the case, personally (from a logical perspective), and your look at the data seems to back this up. But you are also, again if I am not mistaken, saying that the (let's call it) change in susceptibility after the second dose may equal the change after the first dose. That is an extremely hard thing to quantify for a variety of factors, but I will push back on it nonetheless. We can clearly see the first dose leads to negative VE in many different cases across countries and seemingly regardless of situation (except if the virus either does not exist in the population being measured). We do not see the same in the second dose. In fact, we see relatively high VE in many cases. Some of that may be for the reasons you mentioned... but there is another reason that all but guarantees susceptibility is lower after the second dose: the second dose follows the first.

In other words, the first dose makes populations susceptible to the virus, and thus, we are eliminating many candidates from the pool of possible infections during that time period. Infection may not be as robust in the vaccinated as those with natural immunity, but it is still relatively robust. So the second dosers are necessarily less susceptible. Now, if we are talking about a virus naive population, or a single individual, or a small study, this may be true. We can probably even see this in populations like Singapore that had few infections until the population was heavily vaccinated. I wonder if there is data available from there? But I would still be reluctant to believe that the second dose would be equal to the first in this regard (assuming their immune systems learned something from the first dose and susceptibility will be somewhat offset by that learning).

I don't know -- maybe I am missing the point or making a bad point. Or maybe the truth is staring me in the eye and it is too horrific to believe as it would imply we will be living this never ending story as long as they continue to give boosters. Feel free to correct my errors in logic as I am not sure I fully grasp the meaning here.

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Dec 13, 2021Liked by AlmostWrong

I still have twitter, just to be clear, you want me to reply to Igor's comment and write:

“reinfection not just by vaccination status but days since last injection status so that reinfection impact due to immunization is seen clearly possible to judge especially susceptibility in the first 3 weeks.”

Is that right? Sorry for being dense, just want to ensure I am doing this correctly.

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