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Jonathan Engler's avatar

Thanks for a great piece of work.

In response to your question posed near the end, to my mind a likely scenario (which might explain some of the mismatch between the apparent results and “real world” experience) is this:

Sore throat, fever etc (ie “symptoms”) represent a normal immune response to infection.

The injections interfere with the immune response, either generally or specifically in relation to the defence mounted to coronaviruses, to which most would have had some degree of immune memory through previous encounters with other coronaviruses.

So: aberrant immune response -> symptom reduction -> less likely to report -> less likely to test.

Hence it’s possible that at least some of the apparent reduction in infections if defined by (symptoms + PCR) from the injections is essentially illusory as it’s based on a faulty assumption that a reduction in the ordinary symptoms of infection is desirable, clinically relevant, and generalisable to a reduction in more severe symptoms.

One of the many crimes in the assessment of these products was the extrapolation of such clinically irrelevant observations to an assumption that they would prevent infection, transmission and protect against severe disease.

Of course, symptom reduction without viral load reduction (which the above would result in) would create a mass of people who were still infected but with reduced symptoms. This would interfere with evolved behaviour pattern by which sick people stay in bed, lounge around at home, and otherwise avoid other people.

This is consistent with the real world failure of these injections and may also explain (partially at least) why each campaign seemed to induce new waves of infections.

Btw the above would (in my opinion) only contribute partially to the problems with these trials.

I’m not at all diminishing the importance of the various statistical “sieves” applied disproportionately to the 2 groups using inadequate blinding (aka “cheating”).

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Dan Perrier's avatar

Excellent work as always. Your ability to see over the hill is greatly appreciated. A true scholar and scientist.

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