Viruses, Vaccines, & Vanquishing Misinformation

I had thought we were long past this, but the “current thing” (or one of them, they change so fucking fast) thanks to jackasses like Rogan and RFK Jr. and Musk is apparently once again the Covid virus, the Covid vaccine, “anti-vaxxers”, “conspiracy theorists”, and on and on and on.

For. Fucks. Sake.

So, because I’m annoyed, I’m going to take a stab at cutting through the whole bag of bullshit, making a few important distinctions, and just generally trying to simplify and put a bow on this shit.

I’m going to present this in Q&A format, for simplicity.

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Q. Do Masks Work?

A. What do you mean by work? Do you mean “do masks protect the wearer, or other people, 100%?” If that’s what you mean, the answer is of course no. The answer has always been no. This was never in question. Nothing shy of a hazmat suit will get you to 100%, and even then there are edge cases.

But if what you mean is “do masks protect the wearer or other people AT ALL,” then the answer is very clearly yes. Depending on the type of mask, and how well it’s worn, and the environment in which it’s worn (bars and restaurants and crowded events are more risky even with masks), and what portion of other people around the masked person are also masked, they have varying levels of efficacy ranging from not very protective to extremely protective.

What masks DO is decrease risk by varying percentages. And when dealing with a thing spreading exponentially (an R0 above 1), ANY reduction in risk can cut the rate of spread, and also potentially reduce the severity of by reducing viral load exposure.

Humans are naturally very bad at probabilities, which is probably why so many had trouble with this one.

Q. But what about viral particles smaller than a mask’s level of filtration?

A. Good question! There’s a temptation to think of viruses as say, balls of varying sizes, and mask material as a chain link fence. If the virus particle size is smaller than the mask filtration size, it should pass right through, right? Wrong.

For a few reasons, this is not how it works. First, many masks (N95/N99 style masks in particular), have multiple layers of offset material, creating something of a maze that needs to be navigated by a particle. Second, the material these masks are made from have electrostatic properties, which can capture particles that *might* otherwise have made it through. Third, many viral particles are trapped in droplets from coughing or sneezing, and those droplet sizes are more than large enough for a mask to stop. Fourth, your breathing moistens the masks, providing yet another possible way for a viral particle to get caught.

For these reasons, good quality masks such as an N95 or N99, WORN PROPERLY, are very, very effective. Even worn sloppily though they likely still reduce your risk somewhat, just much less than if worn properly.

This seemed super clear to me very early on, having seen real world demonstrations of how masks and particles worked in practice, and since March 2020 my wife and son and I have worn masks whenever we were in close proximity to others, especially indoors in public areas with lots of people…and we haven’t been sick at all now in 3.5 years. Neither have any of our friends who strictly follow the same protocol.

Small sample size, but there you have it.

Q. Fine, masks “work”. What about vaccines? Do they work?

A. What do you mean by work? If you mean “do vaccines guarantee that the vaccinated person will never catch the thing they are being vaccinated for under any circumstances,” of course the answer is no.

BUT, there are generally two sorts of viruses we vaccinate for, slow mutating viruses (measles, mumps, polio, etc.), and fast mutating viruses (flus, Covid, etc.).

For slow mutating viruses, you get 1-3 vaccine doses and you’re generally set for life. Your odds of then catching that thing are basically zero, barring some new variant so different than the vaccine no longer provides protection (unlikely). Some vaccines wane in efficacy, and need boosters (think Tetanus).

For fast mutating viruses, this is why you need flu vaccines each season, because the strains running around vary from year-to-year. And these don’t provide 100% protection by any means, they just equip your immune system with the ability to respond more quickly and effectively to exposure than it otherwise would for the particular strains vaccinated against, thus reducing the length, severity, and transmissibility of the virus if you catch it.

This I think is where a lot of confusion came in with Covid and Covid vaccines.

Q. If the vaccines for fast mutating viruses don’t provide 100% protection, why get them?

A. As with masks, when dealing with fast spreading things that are or could be lethal (even if just for a subset of the population), especially things that are overloading hospitals, ANY reduction in the rate of spread and/or severity and/or length of illness/transmissibility are worth it at scale. This is how they benefit everyone.

Furthermore, since they reduce YOUR individual risk of severe illness and the length of illness, they benefit you directly in that regard (not just your health, but medical expenses, lost wages, stress, etc.), as well as your family and close friends.

Since we live in a society, we often have to balance what’s good for the individual and what’s good for the group. In the case of vaccines, statistically they are good for both the individual and the group, so that’s a win-win.

Q. You said statistically there at the end. What do you mean?

A. As everyone is likely aware by now, vaccines DO come with risks. Since humans differ in many ways, particularly in terms of immune systems and genetics, vaccines don’t interact with everyone in exactly the same way. And yes, some people have adverse reactions to vaccines, in some cases very severe adverse reactions. Sometimes folks die from vaccines. But these cases are very RARE.

With testing, we can determine the rate and severity of side effects, and who is most likely to be negatively affected and why.

That said, what’s important to note is the base rate for serious side effects.

For the Covid vaccine, for example, the rate of Myocarditis or Pericarditis in young folks (<17 and 17-29) was VERY low. I’ve seen varying numbers in studies, and in some versions of the vaccine (Johnson & Johnson being the worst, then Moderna), but generally it seemed to be roughly 1 in 10,000 for the young age groups, which is safer than riding in a car, and roughly on par with your odds of being struck by lightning.

And even then, the symptoms from vaccine complications are often minor and go away on their own. The risks were (and are still), overall, LOW.

Q. Knowing the risks to young folk from Covid appeared very minimal, should they have been forced to get the vaccine knowing the risks of Myocarditis/Pericarditis?

A. Maybe, and this requires a slight tangent. Are you familiar at all with life insurance? The life insurance space is run, basically, by what they call actuarial tables, which is a fancy way of saying, with a given set of factors, when do I think this person applying for insurance is going to die?

They are using statistics to determine the odds of someone dying during the life insurance term, and then pricing the insurance in a way that it should come out profitable for the insurance company overall. They’ll get some individual cases wrong, but net-net it should be accurate enough for the life insurance company’s bottom line to be in the black.

As I understand it, similar modeling was done regarding the risks of Covid vaccine side effects vs. the risk of more susceptible people getting seriously ill or dying due to viral spread from the younger folk (who are often in environments, schools in particular, with poor ventilation and a higher rate of illness transmission). The numbers indicated that the upside to society as a whole clearly exceeded the downside to the rare negatively affected individual.

As much as that sucks at the individual level to those outliers, there are a lot of things in society that need to be done that way. And since the risks appeared to be generally minimal (rare, short-term, largely non-lethal), things rolled forward.

Again, while you may not like this as an individual, there is no way to have a functioning society at present without at least some tradeoffs between what an individual wants, and what is good for the group.

Q. What about lockdowns? Were those warranted? That sort of totalitarian bullshit really shouldn’t fly in a democratic, freedom-loving country.

A. I am largely inclined to agree that lockdowns were an excessive step, but if you remember the early days of Covid, there was a LOT of uncertainty. Is it spread via droplets, or is it airborne? (Turns out both, but more so airborne.) What’s the rate of spread? (Initially estimated at an R0 of 2.2-2.7, the actual median was 5.7, vastly higher than estimated.) How dangerous is it, and to what groups? (Turns out mostly to the elderly and otherwise unhealthy/ill, but that was not clear early on, and folks across the age spectrum were dying, even seemingly healthy folks.)

In an environment of perceived high-risk and low-certainty, it is often better for survival to err on the side of caution. This is why we’re wired to respond more to negatives than positives, a fact the mainstream media thrives on (to our psychological detriment, a tangent for another time).

Further contributing to this was, once it was clear that masks helped reduce spread, the lack of compliance from many folks. The MUH FREEDOMS crowd.

One infected non-masker raises the risk for everyone around them, in some cases very dramatically if they’re super-spreaders, and since infectiousness starts before one is symptomatic, only masking once you knew for sure you were sick wasn’t an effective strategy to prevent spread.

In a scenario where compliance is problematic, and the risk to others is perceived as high, then extreme measures and force is likely necessary and acceptable. And frankly, if you don’t like that, feel free to retreat to a cabin in the woods and live like a hermit.

So, while I personally don’t like the lockdown approach, I can at least understand the variables at play, and why that was arrived at as a strategy.

And of course, we should always remember that hindsight is 20-20. I remember VERY clearly the uncertainty throughout Covid, not to mention some deliberate misinformation (like the “masks don’t work” bullshit in the early days out of mask supply fears for health workers), so be careful with your time traveling indignation.

Q. Sweden didn’t do masking or lockdowns, didn’t things go well for them?

A. Actually, no, they had basically the same rate of deaths to population size as Spain and France, both of which did lockdowns and mask mandates. And that’s with Sweden having both a younger and a generally healthier population.

Q. What about the mRNA vaccines themselves? Should they have been rushed out? Are they dangerous?

A. This was technology that, broadly, had been around since the 1960s/1970s, just not used in this way, which as I understand it was a big part of why it was rolled out so fast. Further, because it is non-infectious (unlike some other vaccine types) it was a very viable approach to use in this scenario.

Was it rushed? Sort of. It was released much faster than a vaccine normally would be, but as I understand it the necessary safety checks were still in place (other than a longitudinal study, which obviously takes much more time).

It was not a case of “we have no idea what this will do, but we need something and there’s money to be made so YOLO,” but rather “we need this to save lives, the technology is fairly well understood, the short-term tests we can run appear safe, and we can keep a close eye on things and adjust as needed, but folks are dying in droves so let’s hop to it.”

Think of mRNA vaccines as sending a blueprint to your immune system, rather than the actual virus itself. It's like providing instructions to your body's antivirus system on how to recognize and combat a specific threat. The mRNA in the vaccine serves as a blueprint, guiding your cells to produce harmless viral proteins. This helps train your immune system to recognize and mount a defense against the real virus, should you ever encounter it in the future. It's akin to giving your immune system a heads-up and preparing it for potential encounters with the virus, much like updating your antivirus software with the latest threat information.

So, effectively, not only are they not dangerous as a category of vaccine, they are superior in many ways to other methods, especially when speed is critical. They are now being researched for numerous other applications, including cancer. Fuck Cancer.

Do we still need to gather longitudinal data about the vaccine and long-term side effects? YES. And we are. And we’ll probably learn new things over time.

But overall, the data on rates of hospitalization and case severity and death rates indicate that the vaccine was a good thing collectively.

Q. So you’re saying that there could be long-term negative effects from the vaccine?

A. Sure, it’s possible. And we should definitely continue to gather data and learn about such things if they are indeed there. But it’s also very unlikely, since we’d almost certainly see some leading indicators by now. But again, as I understand it, this is not the case.

It’s also worth noting that, right now, because Covid as a whole killed a lot of folks and messed up a LOT of data trends, things are very messy. It will take more time for everything to shake out and to have a clearer picture.

Q. Do vaccines cause autism?

A. No.

Q. Then why is autism on the rise?

A. Well, diagnoses are on the rise, but that doesn’t mean autism itself is on the rise. Looser diagnostic criteria is probably the biggest reason we see more cases (the criteria have been loosened twice, in the DSM-IV and the DSM-V, significantly as I understand it), combined with more awareness of ASD and thus more diagnoses. As for the root cause, it’s likely a mix of genetics, epigenetics, something to do with the microbiome (affected by antibiotics, diets, pesticides, chemical exposure, etc.), endocrine disrupters, and perhaps to some degree our level of exposure to intense stimulus and stressors.

It’s almost certainly a multivariate condition, and frankly maybe more of an adaptation than a condition.

Q. Fine, moving on. What about the lab leak hypothesis? Is that likely?

A. Absolutely, and I figured that was the case almost from the beginning. The behavior of this particular virus was weird, the location of spread was somewhat weird, the Chinese government’s response was weird, and other governments not pressuring them harder or taking other measures to get to the bottom of things was extra weird.

I said on Twitter fairly early on that this was likely from a lab, and likely engineered to be more virulent than normal. That was, to me at least, always the scenario that made the most sense based on how things played out.

And, if I’m being super transparent, I actually thought it might have been deliberate on the part of the Chinese. Since Covid predominantly kills the old and sickly, and China has an aging population crisis on their hands, this seems like the sort of ice cold calculus they might engage in if they thought they could get away with it.

But, whether deliberate or accidental, gain of function research (making something MORE virulent in a lab) is bad JuJu, and while I understand the arguments in favor of it, I’m not sure it’s ever really a wise thing to engage in. This is a great resource on this topic.

Is it for certain that it leaked from a lab? It seems that way now, but nothing is 100% certain, especially where it involves the PRC and their perpetual habit of obfuscation.

Q. Don’t vaccines contain other harmful stuff, like mercury, aluminum, thimerosal and formaldehyde?

A. Depends on what you mean by harmful. In the medical world, you have a term called hormesis, which really just means “the dose makes the poison”. Vaccines contain extremely small amounts of some things that, in large doses, would be harmful, but in the quantities in a vaccine, aren’t. You typically get more of these things from the environment around you, by far, than from a vaccine, and already have some of these circulating in your system at any given time at much higher levels.

Q. Can’t we just go the natural immunity route? Isn’t that better anyway?

A. Depends on what you mean by better. Natural immunity tends to grant a longer lasting and somewhat stronger defense, but the tradeoff is that you have to have the illness, and the risks and harms that come with it, and are an illness vector for others in the process, and frankly “immunity” isn’t even the right word anyway when referencing viruses that are mutating quickly.

It’s better for your body to not be sick than to be sick, so in this way a vaccine is a less risky and more comfortable way to develop immunity.

Again, at the end of the day the name of the game is risk reduction, and vaccines fulfill that purpose very, very well.

Q. What about “herd immunity”?

A. It’s a really poor choice of words. In a group, each individual is a node. For each node that has antibodies and resistance to catching/transmitting something, their risk of being an infection vector for others decreases dramatically. If enough nodes are like this, it becomes very hard for illness to spread. But every single node in the system that doesn’t have this reduced risk opens up new pathways for spread.

Anyone who doesn’t have natural or vaccine derived “immunity” is a weak link in the chain, and puts others (especially those who are at greatest risk) in danger, mainly via shedding more viral particles for a longer period than a vaccinated person.

But with a fast mutating virus, “herd immunity” is going to be short-lived. If, by some miracle, we could vaccinate AND isolate everyone for a 2-3 week period, we could in theory stamp out a virus, so long as it couldn’t spread to animals (which Covid can, so there’s that).

But yeah, that’s not gonna happen, so no herd immunity.

It was largely wishful thinking (and probably a bit of propaganda), and that should have been obvious with how quickly Covid was mutating, though again, the fewer/lighter/shorter spreader nodes in the system, the slower the spread overall, so there was still good reason to push for it even if achieving it was never going to happen.

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Anywho, there are probably more points I’m forgetting (I’ll come back and add more as I think of them), and I haven’t bothered to extensively cite data in this article (might go back and rectify that, might not), but I think that covers it fairly well.

Just to be thorough, and for shits and giggles, I ran this through ChatGPT *with browsing enabled* section-by-section to fact check, and it found no issues, so at least there’s that :)