[phtrivier]

Thanks for the explanation. Although, as I understand it, I do not see how it can be anything else than a worst case scenario ?

When someone inevitably spins it as "they sold you vaccines that will let you catch the disease _more_ often, we told you so, subscribe to my podcast / buy my book / vote for me / etc...", what is the counterargument ? That we need more data to confirm ? That there can be other factors causing the reinfections ?

At this point, I'm looking forward for someone saying "it's more complicated than that", which is not a great sign :/

[michaelrpeskin]

There may have been nefarious intentions, and a lot of smart people I follow go that way. But I'm still more charitable than just about everyone I know. I call it the "entropy of ignorance". When dealing with a novel rapidly spreading pathogen that we have no experience with, there are more ways to make a wrong decision than a right decision. A wrong decision then opens up more choices where another wrong decision can be made. A purely statistical argument would show that we'd get the outcome wrong.

In non-emergency cases, we have some random people that follow the right path and that message gets amplified and we find a solution. In this case, that didn't happen (or maybe I should say "hasn't yet happened"). We are seeing with the latest twitter files that some people who were more right then wrong were silenced. The bias towards a more right answer was taken away. Why were they silenced? Could be something as simple a trying to make an easy message "anything that promotes vaccine hesitancy is bad" because good people truly believed that the vaccine would get out of it and they didn't want any confusion.

Back to your comment about "worst case scenario." Yes this is bad, if the vaccine (and in particular the boosters) are actually destroying the immune system, we have a problem. Typically we would have tested this for a long time to see this effect (which is not unknown in the immunology community) but for some reason "we didn't have the time" and we rushed it into millions (billions?) of people. That is bad. Can it get worse? Yes! What if the latent IgG4-enabled virus evolves in vaccinated people and we get another outbreak of a worse virus?

You can probably imagine more bad scenarios. I was a co-author on a paper about significant more (1000x) pregnancy and fertility adverse events after the COVID vaccine compared to the flu vaccine. So we're talking generational effects!

Anyway, not to be too doom and gloom here, but I think you're right "it's more complicated than that" and "we need more data" we just need to collect everything we can, make hypotheses, test them, and learn. That requires lots of open communication.

Extra info: earlier this summer I started to put together a figure to illustrate the "entropy of ignorance" It's outdated, I've learned more since then, but this was my best understanding this summer. You can see how it's easy to have a bad decision keep compounding into more bad decisions. And they can easily happen randomly, it doesn't take nefarious reasons.

https://imgur.com/YZKu3Wn

[adamredwoods]

>> Extra info: earlier this summer I started to put together a figure to illustrate the "entropy of ignorance"

Wow, that's heavily biased. "Create a culture of fear and weakness -> Enforce useless mask-mandates"? That's extremely biased (and ignorant in itself).

Also, it does not follow potential ramifications of some major decision, for example, "lockdown -> no" ends there, failing to illustrate outcomes when observing current spread rates, mutation rates, and death rates of a virus.

[phtrivier]

> Typically we would have tested this for a long time to see this effect (which is not unknown in the immunology community) but for some reason "we didn't have the time" and we rushed it into millions (billions?) of people

Well, in all fairness, the "some reason"s were thousands people dying _every day_ in western countries, overloading health systems. Anyone playing the "let's wait two more years, just to be sure" card had a _very_ hard sell.

To follow your analogy, this is probably a situation where there is vastly more wrong decisions to make, and the right ones require the benefits of 20/20 insight, which, well, GPT-42, maybe ?

To roughly quote a former PM from that period: "my job these days is to arbitrage between bad decisions".

This is were the scientific method of searching for the truth clashes with the politics of managing a human society. Not a particularly new debate, I suppose...

For "laughs" : I almost wish we'd go the complete opposite road next time, keeping the vaxxes in the lab as long a possible, just to see the opposition parties everywhere spread conspiracy theories about the "secret vaccine that the government does not want you to take", etc... Just, for a change.

[busymom0]

I think an objective look at the data clearly showed that the people dying or getting hospitalized were either elderly or had comorbidities. So vaccinating the 60 or 65+, obese, and those with comorbidities should have been enough while doing long term testing for the rest. Instead, we got mandates.