The Antisocial Darwinist

(Warning for the squeamish, there are a lot of curse words in here)

Life has been insane for the past 2 years. No question about that. The real question is, how do we stop the insanity? Let’s have a look.

First, some people believe we are entering a “new normal” era, and we should keep doing what we’re doing to avoid catching COVID-19. Those people are neurotic weirdos and you should never talk to them again. Shun them, push them out of your life and your work in every way you possibly can. They are unreliable, cowardly, and servile, not built for serious human interaction. That’s step one of how to restore sanity in your daily life.

Second, the coronavirus is now endemic. Well, it was endemic before you and I ever heard of it; there was never the slightest possibility of curtailing its spread once it escaped Wuhan. Ever single thing we have done to attempt to arrest it has been futile, and all the damage done to our economies, our souls, and our politics has been for naught. That’s the bad news; the good news is that you can just fucking ignore the virus. Refuse to be tested! If you feel sick, stay home from work, but who fucking cares if it’s a cold or if it’s COVID-19? There is no point in worrying about it; nothing any of us do will prevent approximately everyone from contracting this virus within the next year or two. So quit paying attention to it.

Remember how you treated infectious diseases before the government turned on the fear machine? You had a fever, you stayed home. Or maybe you didn’t. Did you ever wear a mask? If not, why not? Old people die from the fucking flu all the time, you grandma killer. You didn’t because wearing masks is inhuman, and grandma would rather take a small risk of illness in return for seeing her grandchildren’s faces when they talk to her. So get back to that. IGNORE THE CORONAVIRUS, DON’T GET TESTED, and for damn sure don’t act like people around you with a cough are spreading the bubonic plague. DO NOT report “exposures”, and shun anybody who does as the sniveling narc that they are. That’s the number two way to get back to normal.

The number three way to get back to normal is to delete every fucking piece of email from any form of health authority, and don’t answer the phone if they call either. These people are a mix of insane and evil, and have a vested interest in keeping you at maximum fear level forever. Consider this glorious tidbit from the geniuses that I work for, just in time for Christmas:

With positive cases increasing at work, in the community, in the state and around the country — and with the holidays upon us — it is even more important that we remain vigilant to protect ourselves and each other. How can we do this? At work, wear a mask at all times, maintain social distancing and refrain from gathering in groups in breakrooms for celebrations and meals. Frequent hand washing is also critical. At home, wear a mask and stay distant if you think you have been exposed and wash hands frequently.

DON’T DO ANY OF THIS SHIT, with the possible exception of wearing a mask (under protest, of course) at work to appease the Covid Karen Gestapo so you don’t get fired. The rest of this is fucking crazy. Well, the masks at work thing is fucking crazy too, but there’s no point going full Don Quixote and getting fired over a dress code. But “remain vigilant to protect ourselves”???? What the hell man, YOU ARE GOING TO CATCH IT. Nothing will stop that. Quit being a fucking pussy and deal with it. That’s the number three way to get back to normal.

So just to reiterate, kids, three steps to restore normality: 1) tell the Covid Karens to fuck off, 2) stop getting tested and narcing on people who get sick, and 3) quit listening to the idiots from the hospitals and health departments. And have a merry, unmasked, vax-optional Christmas with all the sane people in your life!

First — Happy Yule, to any heathens or divers other pagans who stumble across this blog. Today is Sunna’s day, and may we appreciate her all the more on this shortest of days.

Now on to the post.

Sometimes I think the overall purpose of this blog gets lost in the details of this or that issue I write about. Am I just ranting for the sake of being controversial? Am I some kind of masochistic freak who enjoys hate mail? Well, maybe. But the above-board reason I write this thing — or at least, the reason I continue to write this thing seven years after its creation — is an abiding concern to do my part to preserve public trust in science and scientists. The Great Awokening, beginning I think in 2014, carried with it a wide variety of claims that, while completely political in nature, justified themselves in the language of science. Because nearly every word of these “scientific” justifications was blatantly and obviously false — there are not more than two genders, there are important biological differences amongst sexes and races, climate change is not an “existential crisis”, etc — they run the risk of eroding public trust in science as an institution if actual scientists are not seen to push back against them. But of course most of my colleagues are either collaborators or cowards, so almost no one pushes back, creating an ever-greater moral imperative on those of us who are not collaborators or cowards to do something. So I do what I can, with my limited audience, to push the needle back toward objectivity and sanity.

I worry, especially, that the bullshit surrounding the coronavirus vaccines is the “straw that broke the camel’s back” re: public opinion toward science. As recently as the late 2010s scientists and the military still held relatively high levels of bipartisan support from the public, at least in comparison to previously cordycepted professions like journalism, education, and economics. But in the wake of the “pandemic” even these two august institutions have suffered in the public eye. David Cole, in this piece released today over at Taki’s Mag, lays out the problem pretty well:

A Yahoo News article last week detailed how Americans have become “exhausted” and “shell-shocked” by endless contradictory and sometimes flat-out wrong Covid directives and predictions by scientists. Back in February, a Pew poll found that fewer than two-in-ten U.S. adults believe that scientists are transparent about conflicts of interest, and only one-in-ten believe that “scientists admit their mistakes and take responsibility for them all or most of the time.”

So, less than 20% of poll respondents believe that scientists, you know, do science, because being willing to change one’s position in light of new evidence — i.e., admit one’s previous mistakes and abandon pet theories — is at the core of ethical scientific practice. Cole continues:

The public’s relationship with science should, ideally, be governed by what’s known as “good-faith skepticism.” It’s an assumption going in that scientists are not trying to do harm, and indeed, most sincerely want to do good. But, under certain conditions, be it human error, avarice, political pressure, or competition for grants, even people with decent intentions can foul up.

Good-faith skepticism regarding scientists is vital for a healthy society. It’s a balance: Should it tip too far in one direction (mindless gullibility and acceptance of everything a lab-coater tells you) or the other (automatic dismissal of science as a field and scientists as “Tuskegee Frankensteins”), it’s bad news. And two years of Covid have brought nothin’ but bad news, with some leftists coming to view scientists as gods, and some rightists coming to view them as Mengeles.

The “politician/scientist alliance” (typified by the Democrats and Fauci) has done much to encourage both extremes, exhorting the left to lionize lab-coaters (Fauci literally declaring, “I am science”), and taunting the right with a stubborn refusal to admit errors and uncertainties.

Cole’s term “the politician/scientist alliance” is, I think, incredibly apt. Politics is an innately corrupting force, and to the degree that it intersects with any field, it will corrupt that field. The Founders’ purpose in “separating church and state” was not to protect the state from the church, but the other way around — to shield the sacred from the corrupting influence of the politician — because nothing encourages atheism more than a political priest, and by the same token, nothing encourages blanket skepticism like a politicized scientist.

Cole calls this blanket skepticism “Bad-faith skepticism” — as in, the observer no longer gives the benefit of the doubt to the scientist that he/she is being honest about data. This is surely justified today, as “health authorities” refuse to acknowledge exculpatory evidence regarding vaccine skepticism, refuse to present data contrary to their political positions, and obfuscate about published research that contradicts the talking points they have been told to publicly support. Cole concludes:

Science is merely a discipline. But it’s an essential discipline for any civilized nation. The exploitation of science by the likes of Fauci, Soros, and the Democrats, and the resulting evaporation of trust in science among large sectors of the public, is not beneficial.

It’ll boomerang back on the Dems, and that’s good. But it’ll also harm the nation…and that isn’t.

So true — which is likely to kill more people, SARS-2 or 50% of the population losing faith in doctors and scientists? Was the real problem with the Tuskegee experiment that it hurt a handful of Alabama blacks directly, or that it indirectly led to nearly all African-Americans losing trust in medicine, for generations? My goal with this blog is to very publicly demonstrate that not everyone in academic science is a political goon, and to attempt, with what little power I have, to maintain the conditions to salvage our discipline after our current cold civil war is over.

In both of the last two semesters, I’ve included one lecture per course critical of coronavirus orthodoxy. In the spring, I had my microbiology students read a peer-reviewed manuscript in a well-regarded journal laying out the case that SARS-COV-2 was a product of genetic engineering. I was quite nervous giving this lecture, but amusingly before the semester had even ended, fellow cancelled science writer Nicholas Wade had written a very thorough article laying out the case with even more evidence, and my “controversial” position had become commonly accepted as true. This past semester I had my students read the article by Kennedy and Read mentioned in this earlier blog post: briefly, a 2017 review/hypothesis article focusing on why vaccines usually work for a long time, and what causes them to sometimes fail. In short, the few human vaccines to have conspicuously failed in the past all have characteristics similar to the SARS-2 vaccines, and one predicts that those, too, will fail, as evidenced by massive amounts of evidence from around the world that vaccinated and unvaccinated people get infected at the same rate and transmit the virus at the same rate. While this certainly hasn’t become commonly accepted at this point, situations like this suggest that the dam is breaking and the reality that the vaccine has become useless less than a year after its introduction will be undeniable. BUT REGARDLESS, the point behind taking the risk of some kool-aid drunk leftist student trying to cancel me again is the necessity that students see some evidence during their time in university that science still works, at least a little bit, with the hope that it will preserve some kernel of good faith skepticism in them in later life, since most of them will (hopefully) outlive the crisis the US is going through.

The alternative is a dark age, which we know is a possibility after the collapse of an empire. My role is small, but like Aetius at the Catalaunian Plains, all I can do is try.

In their own words:

As we have already discussed on this blog, 1) the vaccine doesn’t do shit to prevent infection or transmission and 2) this was predictable from the beginning if you know anything about the evolution of pathogens. In a mass-vaxxed population, each successive “wave” (i.e., each selective sweep) will be less affected by the vaccine than the one before. This fact is demonstrated clearly by this paper by Wang, Chen and Wei from Michigan State University*, which shows a clear thermodynamic difference between detected mutations in SARS-COV-2 spike protein that allows most of them to be split into “competition specialists” with greater affinity for the human ACE-2 receptor, or “defense specialists” that have weaker affinity for vaccine-induced antibodies. (Note that the dichotomy of competition vs. defense is my own addition, based on the Red Queen hypothesis and the “Kill-the-winner” theory of viral evolution.) Wang et al. demonstrate that the vaccine-resistant defense mutations, such as the one that defined the Delta variant, only spread efficiently in populations after mass vaccination began. Presumably the new “Omicron” variant represents an even greater level of resistance, or else it would not be able to displace Delta. Presumably also, neither Delta nor Omicron would be as successful in a predominantly unvaccinated population due to trade-offs between antibody resistance and ACE-2 affinity (although Wang et al also demonstrate the amazing power of viral evolution, in that the defense mutations are almost always found in combination with one or more competition mutations, presumably all convergently evolved unless we have way more COVID-19 superinfections occurring than one would expect).

Which is to say, of course, that viral evolution is rendering whatever immunity was originally conferred by the COVID vaccines increasingly irrelevant. We are told that boosters are effective, but it’s not clear to me why this should be, since they only reactivate the same memory B-cells that infection would reactivate. Perhaps having a large number of currently circulating antibodies provides some relief from symptoms by compensating for the reduced antibody affinity for the virus? But if that’s the case, how long can that possibly last? And if every shot carries with it the risk of heart issues — caused, I imagine, by cardiac tissue expressing SARS-COV-2 spike mRNA and eliciting autoimmune attacks by the well-trained adaptive immune system — then surely we are moving into a period where the risk of maintaining a constant immune response outweighs whatever tiny risk the virus carries? The immune system attacks viruses by destroying human cells. Chronic high-level immune activity leads to chronic inflammation, which over the long run causes all sorts of problems. Moreover, if simply upping the dose of antibodies hugely above the natural response is effective at reducing symptoms, is not post-infection monoclonal antibody treatment not exactly equivalent in mechanism to the effect of boosters, only with the advantages of 1) avoiding chronic immune response, 2) avoiding expression of spike protein in non-respiratory circulatory tissue, and 3) more readily allowing updates to the antibodies used for treatment to track the evolution of the virus?

Instead, health authorities throughout western civilization appear to be doubling-down on vaccination, even as the vaccines lose any possible theoretical justification. The US government, and its lackies throughout the Cathedral (including, of course, my employers, as well as those of Wang et al and thousands of other scientists who are still capable of critical thinking) are willing to shutter businesses and cast western civilization’s brightest talents into the outer darkness to bolster a vaccine that doesn’t work. However bad COVID-19 might be, it’s nowhere near as bad as being poor. Why, then, do they push so hard in support of this crap drug? My suspicion is that it’s equal parts malevolence and incompetence, propped up by a servile population that has swallowed all the hysterical propaganda they’ve been fed over the past two years to the point they’ll do anything they irrationally believe will protect them.

Will 2022 be any better than 2021? My guess is no, it’s an election year, and the government will double down on its fear porn and its outright repression of dissent as a mechanism to keep from losing power. The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly over; all that we are left with is a pandemic of government. What is the vaccine for that? Show me, and I’ll happily take as many booster doses as you want to give me.

* Michigan State University, where I spent 4.5 years of my life studying microbial evolution, has embarrassingly become a bastion of the anti-science left. It is a sad state of affairs that this paper had to come from MSU’s math and engineering departments, with no input from MSU’s formerly world-class microbiology and/or EEB departments. Remember kids — woke, not even once.

Because beautiful things are important.

One of the most egregious acts of the “public health authorities” during these Plague Years has been their refusal to educate the public about how viruses actually interact with the human immune system. The messaging from official sources has focused on a singular message of “avoid COVID infection at all costs”, which is a) impossible and b) undesirable. What’s worse is that this message creates fear in everyone who believes it. For the great majority of people with no training in biology or medicine (and unfortunately even for many who are in these fields as well), it creates a paranoid germophobia that encourages the sorts of extreme behaviors we are seeing today — e.g. obsessive masking and hand-sanitizing, isolation, unnecessary vaxxing, and support for authoritarian and even repressive political policies. It can scarcely be argued that the impact of this widespread psychological trauma on the public is not worse than any effect of the SARS-COV-2 virus itself, and it is obvious that the authorities could defuse it overnight by changing their messaging and attempting to temper the public’s fear with nuanced understanding of how viruses and the immune system work. But the authorities do not do this, and in fact do the opposite, for instance by acting like the emergence of a new “variant” of SARS-COV-2 is a shocking tragedy, instead of the inevitable evolutionary behavior of a widespread virus.

Pessimistically one might assume that the authorities stoke these fears for financial reasons. They are selling vaccines, “free” to the public but bought and paid for by mandate from the public treasury. At $20 a shot, the vaccine industry has made more than $10 billion in the US alone, all without having to worry about advertising or competition or indeed even government regulatory oversight (VAERS schmaers!). Some public health authorities are no doubt directly on the payroll of Pfizer/Moderna/et al, others are shareholders, but direct corruption is not the only thing potentially going on. Boots-on-the-ground scientists and universities play along because they depend on NIH and CDC for research funding, so they pretty much have to do what these organizations say, and NIH and CDC depend on public fear of various health conditions to drum up support for increasing their funding from the federal government. Those of us old enough might remember how the CDC has tried to spin up other viruses into objects of fear over the years — Zika, West Nile, Dengue fever, ebola, various influenza variants — presumably always searching for a new cash cow to regain the glory days when they scared the public shitless over AIDS/HIV and guaranteed themselves two decades of high level funding.

Less cynically, it’s possible that many of the health authorities are just as crazy as everyone else. COVID paranoia seems to be primarily centered on the urban elites in the US — and of course 100% of the people telling us to be afraid are from that group. But perhaps the most generous explanation for the messaging of constant fear is that the authorities believe that only fear will motivate the population to do what “they ought to do” to protect themselves against the virus. I have wondered, for instance, if my own university’s deception of the public regarding the value of natural immunity or universal vaccine mandates was motivated by a belief that, were they to admit any valid reason to not take a COVID vaccine, there would be many people who would conclude that no one should take a COVID vaccine. From their perspective, then, they would be deceiving the public for its own good. Of course this is a completely immoral, ends-justifies-the-means type of reasoning, and to the degree that this represents the beliefs of our medical authorities, it represents — as I have stated previously — grotesque, unforgivable malpractice. Moreover, to the degree that healthcare professionals would willfully attempt to inflict psychological pain on the general public, this represents a crime against human decency and charity so great as to beggar belief — the diametrical opposite of what such people should be doing, the anodyne of medical ethics.

Well anyway, I figure it’s my job to do what I can to counteract all of that. People should never make decisions from fear. Therefore I would strongly encourage anyone to read the below linked piece, which describes very carefully the Red Queen dance of viruses and the immune system, explains clearly why natural immunity is infinitely superior to a vaccine subscription service and why normal human interaction is necessary for the immune system to work properly, and does so without the hyperbole and anger you are likely to get from many dissident sources (including, alas, this blog). It’s a long piece but it’s worth the time you’ll spend with it. If for no other reason, it has some great trees and Muller plots showing the evolutionary dynamics of viruses that those of you who teach biology courses may find helpful.

https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/12/a-half-truth-is-whole-lie-omicron.html