Musings Report 2020-47 11-21-20 Has It Been Too Easy?
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Has It Been Too Easy?
Patron/correspondent S. L. sent me a thought-provoking email that I've been pondering all week. (S.L., I hope you won't mind me paraphrasing your thoughts.)
In the context of Musings #46,
Moral Decay Leads to Collapse, S.L. posited that perhaps America's acquisition of global dominance after World War II was akin to the mindset one acquires when your first trade in the stock market is a huge winner:
wow, this is so easy.
If your second and third trades are also big winners (which is what happens in a melt-up Bull market), then your confidence in the ease of making big gains is cemented. (It's also easy to attribute the tremendous success to one's natural genius or aptitude.)
S.L. suggested that perhaps the same dynamic took hold in America's political-economic leadership: maintaining America's hegemony no longer required sacrifice and difficult trade-offs that demanded a higher order of leadership.
In the context of moral collapse leading to social-political collapse, S.L. linked moral decay to the mindset of the undemanding wins of a neophyte with the good fortune to start betting in a raging Bull market: every bet is a winner until the market reverses, and then the game requires real knowledge of history, experience, prudence, discipline, painful sacrifices and careful decision-making, i.e. leadership.
Something on the order of 99.9% of all traders who become supremely confident in their "genius" and/or the easiness of scoring one big win after another in a Bull market lose everything in the inevitable Bear market, because
everything they thought they knew with certainty no longer applies. Even worse, every attempt to apply this "knowledge" only increases their losses.
We may be facing a similar dynamic with the widespread belief that "the vaccine is going to make Covid go away and we can go back to the world of 2019."
The context here is the near-perfect efficacy of the vaccines which emerged in the 1950s such as polio and measles. These vaccines were essentially 100% effective and the number of vaccinated people who suffered a serious side effect was extremely small.
The upside was miraculous. Scourges of humanity were eliminated.
But there are various classes of viruses which don't lend themselves to near-100% effective vaccines. Indeed, despite extraordinary gains in knowledge of viruses, there is still
no cold vaccine at all, no HIV vaccine at all and no influenza vaccine that approaches 99% effectiveness.
Enter the coronavirus and a new mechanism for generating the desired immune response, mRNA, which I addressed in depth in a previous Musings--an overview that offered numerous links to articles for your own research.
Despite very limited data which has yet to be released for peer-reviewed analysis, the pharmaceutical corporations are
claiming 95% efficacy and near-zero side effects, i.e. near-100% safety.
This harkens back to the miracle vaccines of the 1950s, but the difference is this is a different class of virus and a different vaccine mechanism which has been studied for a handful of years but never tested in large-scale human trials before.
As a result, the bar for approving this novel vaccine for a novel (hybrid) virus should be higher than for a conventional vaccine for a well-known virus. Instead, the approval process has been rushed to an unprecedented degree.
There is precious little peer-reviewed science that supports these grandiose claims of 100% safety and 95% efficacy for a novel vaccine and novel virus.
The only applicable research was done on the SARS vaccine a number of years ago, as the Covid virus shares the majority of the genetic code as the SARS virus (hence the Covid virus being identified as SARS 2).
But the sample size of SARS 1 patients was very small, and when the disease was brought under control, research into a vaccine ceased.
The high expectations being raised by these claims align with the limbic social memory of miracle vaccines from the 1950s and 1960s. The idea that vaccines can achieve near-perfect results with near-perfect safety is firmly embedded in the public mind.
The awareness of our inability to develop a vaccine for the cold and HIV viruses has a much smaller share of the public mind and the zeitgeist.
In other words, vaccines are easy and so there are no unknowns or ambiguities, and thus no difficult sacrifices or trade-offs will be necessary.
Maybe these vaccines are 95% effective and 100% safe, but there simply isn't enough data to establish that with any certitude. Anyone who takes these claims as fact is confusing faith with science, which is fundamentally skeptical.
I'll share a few general misconceptions being made as examples.
For the polio vaccine, the end-point was no live polio virus in the patient.
For the Covid vaccine, the end-point is considerably less stringent: no severe Covid in the patient. In other words, the patient can have live SARS 2 virus and as long as they have no severe symptoms, the vaccine is considered 100% effective.
As one of my MD correspondents put it, the test of efficacy for polio is serological--no live virus in the bloodstream. The test for the Covid vaccine is clinical--no severe disease.
This leaves open the question, can someone who was vaccinated transmit the virus to others? The studies done to date do not answer that definitively because the protocol was not designed to answer it.
The polio vaccine lasts a lifetime. There is no reliable data on how long the Covid vaccine will last because not enough time has elapsed to conclude anything with any certainty. To claim that it will be long-lasting is to make a statement of faith because there is no data to support that claim.
The claim being made is the efficacy of the vaccine applies to all ethnicities, ages and conditions--it is as blanket a protection as the polio and measles vaccines. yet the trial protocol was not designed to test the vaccine on the most-at-risk groups--those 60 and older, and those with co-morbidities / chronic illnesses.
The volunteers were not exposed to the virus under controlled conditions, so how can these claims of efficacy be substantiated?
Perhaps the real-world efficacy of the vaccine will turn out to be closer to 80% than 95%. That would mean everyone who took the vaccine would still have a 1 in 5 chance of contracting the disease. That is a considerably different risk profile than 95%, (one in twenty chance of contracting the disease.)
There are concerns in the literature about the potential for a generalized immune response to mRNA vaccines which could initiate autoimmune responses. These concerns have not been reduced to zero for the same reasons: the sample sizes are too small, the protocols too limited, and the time spans too limited.
The vaccines are being presented as rock-solid, as if science has triumphed with the near-perfect certainty as we have come to expect.
But what if future data doesn't support this certainty? What if there are intrinsic ambiguities and uncertainties in Covid and mRNA vaccines which cannot be eliminated?
I suspect that the expectations being raised--100% safety and 95% efficacy--are setting up the same collapse of confidence and trust experienced by the novice trader whose initial wins build up an unrealistic confidence in the ease of winning and in their own skill / aptitude.
When these unrealistic expectations are not met in the real world, the trader has no experience to deal successfully with the sacrifices, ambiguities and trade-offs necessary when winning is no longer easy.
Highlights of the Blog
Podcasts:
AxisOfEasy Salon #31: The Covid Episode
Posts:
The One Chart That Predicts our Future 11/20/20
Vaccines--Too Little, Too Late? 11/18/20
U.S. Healthcare Is Unraveling 11/17/20
Don't Blame Covid: The Economy is Imploding from Over-Capacity and Corrupt Cartels 11/16/20
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
An MD working in an overwhelmed Covid ward began a correspondence with me, which has proven very informative, enlightening and sobering. This MD joins my extensive network of senior MDs, epidemiologists and other professional medical-sciences researchers. I have learned an immense amount in the past ten months from these knowledgeable, experienced sources, and from the articles and papers they have recommended from professional journals and similar trusted sources. Very few have such a Brain Trust to aid their understanding of the pandemic, the virus and the vaccines.
Thanks to these resources, I've read dozens of scientific papers and bounced my questions off these experts. There is no substitute for reading the research and reviewing the actual data. This is why I've devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to this reading and study.
Thank you, Brain Trust!
From Left Field
Sixty-Day Outcomes Among Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19: "In this multihospital cohort of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Michigan, nearly 1 in 3 patients died during hospitalization or within 60 days of discharge." (Annals of Internal Medicine) -- file under "not the flu or a cold..."
The narrative problem after peak oil
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
High Times Greats: Buckminster Fuller: A 1981 interview with the late architect, futurist, and proponent of the geodesic dome.
Woman Transforms Rotting Tree Into a "Little Free Library" in Her Front Yard
Dave Chappelle Stand-Up Monologue - SNL (16:35) (via GFB)
Understanding Hoarding Relationships--How do you form such deep attachments to objects? -- OK, I'm a hoarder...
Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing? Some academics argue that unhappy elites lead to political instability--the Economist finally gets around to looking at Turchin's work... and the issue isn't a surplus of "brainy people," it's over-credentialed people; the two are not necessarily equivalent...
Here's How Many Cells in Your Body Aren't Actually Human: They found that for a man between 20 and 30 years old, with a weight of about 70 kg (154 pounds) and a height of 170 cm (about 5'7) - they call him the 'reference man' - there would be about 39 trillion bacterial cells living among 30 trillion human cells. This gives us a ratio of about 1.3:1 - almost equal parts human to microbe.
Neil Howe interview (7:57 min) -- discussing the 4th Turning that's underway....
Covid-19 vaccines shouldn’t get emergency-use authorization:
Public trust in vaccines is already in decline. The FDA should proceed with caution. -- MIT experts cautious, Big Pharma and politicians are gung-ho...
Medical costs of discharged German COVID patients 50% above pre-admission levels -- what happens after "recovery and discharge" is being ignored because it doesn't fit the happy-story narrative....
Doctors Are Calling It Quits Under Stress of the Pandemic: Thousands of medical practices are closing, as doctors and nurses decide to retire early or shift to less intense jobs. -- and this won't have any consequences?...
Doctors and nurses want more data before championing vaccines to end the pandemic
"Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance." (Jean Antoine Petit-Senn, via GFB)
Thanks for reading--
charles
