Dear reader, if you have been checking this blog periodically expecting a rant about the coronavirus vaccine, I apologize for keeping you waiting. Even after my university eagerly declared it was ready to fire several thousand employees, ranging from tenured professors to custodians, if they haven’t been vaxxed by January 4, I stayed quiet. If you’ve been with me for a while you know I am on the record since 2015 as opposing vaccine mandates, and last summer I weighed in on the side of a herd immunity strategy for dealing with the so-called coronavirus “pandemic”, since I expected that an effective vaccine would not be forthcoming in a reasonable period of time (turns out I was right, see below). Since then I have been religiously following the published research on the SARS-2 outbreak, and some colleagues and I have also entertained ourselves by keeping up with some of the publicly available datasets on case numbers, deaths, vaccinations, and so forth, as a reality check on the egregiously dumbed-down messaging coming from “public health authorities”, whatever those are. I’ve been very active in a few semi-public online forums discussing some of these issues, and have even gone so far as to lobby my state legislators for certain SARS-2 related policies I wanted to see enacted. But, uncharacteristically, I haven’t written about any of this on this blog. Why?
Two reasons, really. First, I remained cautiously optimistic until late summer that the vaccines would ultimately work, and that we would rapidly achieve herd immunity through vaccination and/or natural recovery and put this craziness behind us. Second, I am ashamed to say that I was (and still am, to be honest) afraid of the vaccine’s supporters. If Woke needed an excuse to go full Nazi, I guess this was it. Given that these people are erecting gulags and concentration camps in multiple countries, I felt motivated not to get on their hit list, and held out hope that the world would return to sanity before things got much worse.
OK, that was then, this is now. I feel like if I don’t make at least a token effort to demonstrate that not everyone at my university is a lying piece of shit, I will be doing a great disservice both to my students/trainees and to microbiologists both past and future. So here’s my pronouncement, in extra large font to make sure you don’t miss it:
THE VACCINES DON’T WORK.
That has to be the beginning of any discussion of vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, or whatever – the vaccines in their current form never worked properly, don’t work at all any more, and what’s more, it should have been obvious to everyone involved in their creation that they wouldn’t work . There’s no point in getting bogged down on the ethical and moral dimensions of mandating vaccination when the vaccine in question doesn’t actually work to begin with!
I first became concerned about the effectiveness of the SARS-2 vaccines in July, when a gang of Texas Democrat “fleebaggers” fled their state in a stunt to deny a quorum and prevent a vote on some kind of pro-life or election reform bill or some other sensible thing they opposed. Even though 100% of the fleebaggers were “double-vaxxed”, many of them came down with the virus on this trip and ultimately spread it to some of their colleagues in the White House. Now, anyone who knows anything about vaccines knows that no vaccine is 100% effective, but this level of community spread in a situation where everyone was vaccinated was shocking to me, and should have been shocking to anybody. The most parsimonious explanation for what happened is that one of the fleebaggers had the virus and then spread it to all the rest – followed by a tertiary transmission by at least one of them to somebody at the White House later on.
Why did this worry me so much? Consider this 2017 hypothesis paper by Kennedy and Read that I’ve been teaching in both my microbiology and evolution classes for several years. The authors talk about why antibiotic resistance evolves more readily in most cases than vaccine resistance – namely that antibiotics are applied when you’re already sick and therefore full of bacteria whereas vaccines are applied before virus exposure and therefore are rarely challenged by more than a small number of virus genomes. The rate of evolutionary improvement in these cases is limited by mutational supply – you need a lot of random mutations challenging the antimicrobial to discover the rare one that confers resistance – and mutational supply is a function of population size. Kennedy and Read then bolster their conceptual argument by considering the handful of vaccines that have failed due to pathogen evolution. Every one of these failed vaccines had at least one of two characteristics: either they targeted a single protein, or else they were incapable of fully preventing infection and transmission. In the former case, it is much easier to find a single mutation that can provide complete vaccine evasion, since vaccinated individuals have a very simple response compared to the layered polyvalent response created by natural infection. In the latter case, even though the vaccine is initially capable of suppressing viral symptoms, it allows large viral populations to accumulate, exponentially increasing the number of mutants that can challenge the vaccine-induced immune response. Every vaccine with one of these characteristics failed; every SARS-2 vaccine has both characteristics: the SARS-2 vaccines solely target the SARS-2 spike protein, and the fleebagger incident strongly suggested they were incapable of suppressing viral reproduction and transmission.
At that moment, I knew that viral evolution would eventually defeat the vaccines, and started looking for evidence of the fact. It wasn’t long before those countries and states that publish weekly detailed datasets started revealing exactly the trend I expected – an ever-shrinking gap between infection rates in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Eventually in the UK, vaccinated populations were being infected more than unvaccinated populations. One can wave their hands to explain that away – there are obviously differences between who chooses to vax and who doesn’t that could be relevant to virus exposure – but you can’t explain away the fact that the vaccine provides only a marginal and ever-shrinking level of protection, and has no effect on transmission rates. In other words, the SARS-2 vaccines are not even remotely capable of stopping or even slowing the progression of the SARS-2 outbreak, and vaccine mandates are futile and doomed to fail.
(I thought about putting up some of my own data analysis here but there’s not much point… others have done it much more thoroughly than I have time to. I strongly encourage you to read the blogger eugyppius’ substack – he is an anonymous biologist living in Bavaria who provides consistently solid analysis of the various datastreams available. But if you don’t trust anonymous bloggers, consider reading this recently-published letter from the notorious QAnon publication The Lancet that lays out the case for vaccine failure in a wonderfully concise two pages and one figure.)
So this has been accumulating for months now, and it honestly escapes me how anyone – and especially doctors and scientists – could not be aware of it by now. It’s so in-your-face it’s ridiculous. Moreover, the question of whether vaccine-derived immunity or natural immunity is superior would appear to be conclusively settled – there have been millions of “break-through” infections of the vaccinated, whereas detected re-infections remain so rare the CDC is forced to publish weirdly gerrymandered datasets with a couple hundred cases to try to make its case about why you should keep getting jabbed even if you’ve had SARS-2 and recovered. But the authorities in these matters still stubbornly refuse to accept what is right before their eyes, and cling to the vaccines as the only way out of the “pandemic”. Consider this tidbit from a recent email my university sent out, reminding us about how they have to fire every employee who hasn’t submitted their vaxx cards by January 4 or else President Brandon will take their grants away (emphasis mine):
Please continue to look to official UAB communications for the latest news and updates. If you have not already, please get vaccinated to keep yourself and everyone around you safe. Vaccines are free, safe, effective, and critical to putting an end to the pandemic as soon as possible.
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE. The vaccines aren’t free – they cost taxpayers $20 a pop give or take. They aren’t particularly safe – as of this writing 8,898 deaths along with an order of magnitude more heart attacks, miscarriages, anaphylaxis, and other horrors related to the SARS-2 vaccines have been reported to the CDC’s VAERS database, and nobody has given me any reason to believe that these numbers are anything but a low-ball estimate of the risks associated with vaxxing. They aren’t effective, as I’ve shown above. Maybe they provide some level of risk reduction? But even that appears to be slipping if you look at the vaxxed vs. unvaxxed death rates month-by-month, consistent with the hypothesis that adaptive evolution is causing the SARS-2 population to become progressively more immune to the existing crop of vaccines. And the last statement – that vaccination is an important part of ending the pandemic – is laughably false and grossly irresponsible. If anything, mass vaccination of the population has prolonged the pandemic by slowing down the development of robust natural immunity.
Not only is none of this true, but all of it is coming out of a university whose administration is almost entirely staffed by doctors and scientists! Here’s their justification for threatening to fire unvaxxed employees, including the many who have naturally recovered from infection and are therefore almost certainly more SARS-2-resistant than the vaccinated employees, from the same email quoted above (emphasis mine):
Because this vaccination requirement is mandated by the federal government, UAB does not have flexibility in its application or enforcement. Failure to comply will place UAB in jeopardy of losing millions of dollars that we receive through federal contracts and awards, as well as jobs funded, in part, by those dollars.
On some level I understand that they are reluctant to jeopardize their grant money by angering the doddering and capricious Brandon regime, and one has to appreciate the UAB administration’s honesty in openly admitting they prioritize grant dollars over the lives and wellbeing of their employees, but at this point they know as well as I do that vaccine mandates have no public health dimension at all. If we vaxxed 100% of the population, nothing important would happen other than a few thousand more people — many of them children — would die from vaccine-related injuries. That doctors would go along with the regime’s dangerous, counter-productive, anti-scientific, and politically-driven mandate without even providing a token resistance is, in my opinion, grotesque malpractice, and any so-called doctor colluding to facilitate or provide cover for this great crime should be stripped of their right to practice medicine for the rest of their lives.
The public looks to their doctors for guidance; they look to scientists for knowledge; and we are giving them shitty advice and lying to them in order to appease a political regime that openly and unapologetically hates half of the population it governs. It’s unconscionable; in its deception it is disturbingly similar to the crime that was committed by the researchers behind the Tuskegee Experiment, only spread to every walk of life and every corner of the nation. If doctors and scientists don’t start publicly pushing back against this shit and calling out the quacks who are willing to deceive the public for grant payouts, they are going to come after us with pitchforks and torches like in the Frankenstein movies. And rightfully so! Consider this blog my declaration of which side of that mob I would rather be on.
The Antisocial Darwinist 