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It sounds like you might be a good person to review and give your thoughts on this interview between Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, and Geert Vanden

• lamontcg 5y ago
  Skimmed it, seems like its a lot of bullshit wrapped up in plausible sounding science. The H1N1 pandemic is an interesting historical model, and the more deadly later waves indicate that more virulent variants were produced in that pandemic as well. He seems to be arguing that vaccines are causing the variants and that natural herd immunity is better, which is bullshit. First of all the vaccines are 80-90% effective, even against variants, which greatly reduces the number of people that the vaccine can use to mutate new variants. When there are vaccination failures the vaccines prevent symptoms, prevent viral load and shedding and transmissibility. That cuts down on the production of variants as well. There's also considerable cross protection in the human immune system since immunity isn't binary like an on/off switch. As a historical example the people born before 1957 were exposed to H1N1 and had cross reactive T-cells to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. So after mutating in pigs for 50 years the human immune system still recognized the H1 envelope protein sufficiently to take the edge off of that pandemic to make it essentially nothing. And we vaccinated younger people (with I.M. flu vaccines) and didn't see the emergence of hugely virulent H1N1 variants. The variants are arising now because there's a decreasing fraction of the population which is 100% susceptible to infection and the virus is chasing after that decreasing fraction by increasing transmissibility, viral load and virulence. The vaccines will be effective at taking people out of that 100% susceptible pool even though they're not absolutely perfect. The virus will eventually run out of that 100% susceptible pool and will have to start optimizing for costly immune escape variants which will lower its virulence in order to try to get around vaccinated and recovered individuals immune systems. This right now, with the evolution of more virulent variants is the WORST time to be playing the natural herd immunity card. Everyone needs to get vaccinated to protect themselves and to put the virus under more pressure to make costlier mutations than it has been able to make so far. Spreading this idea that the vaccines are producing the more lethal variants is literally going to get people killed by having them skip vaccinations and wind up contracting one of the most lethal variants the pandemic is likely to produce. That is optimizing for the worst possible roll of the dice for yourself. So yeah, he should be banned off of social media and you're killing people by spreading this misinformation. Cheers.
  • loceng 5y ago
    The COVID-19 vaccine is less effective against the variants, and arguably unknown if immunity developed from dead-virus based vaccines would provide higher effectiveness against variants and reduce potential for escape. You're arguing to ban critical thinkers having a conversation, perhaps instead you should be ban off social media for wanting to censor intellectuals/critical thinkers? Especially since you're seemingly giving a well-thought out response but you immediately admit you skimmed it, and then wrongly claim they're pushing for herd immunity. You also reference cross immunity, however those weren't using mRNA vaccines afaik, and so the mechanism and spread that the immunity will cover for variants won't be the same. I was wrong, you're not as rational or thorough of a person I thought you might be based on your initial explanation that I responded to.
  • mycall 5y ago
    If mutations are random events, how does a virus know it is under more pressure because randomizing events occur less often?