Getting the vax details wrong, but the big picture right

A copy of Steve Kirsch's essay on how the CDC is allegedly misleading us with covid-19 data:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15xRA5isx-4NvmqLc8KNWSa16uqkn2wARhwf1Czt3hBQ/edit?usp=sharing 

The following is a series of emails I've sent to an anti-vaxxer friend. I think the anti-vaxxers get the big picture right, but the details wrong. The big picture being that governments and corporations are controlling much of people's lives; there are not many good ways left for "right livelihood" in today's world (with the exception of science, engineering and computers, which are out of reach for most people, and also the ethics can be questioned even there, and also jobs that are about healing the sick, traumatized people that this culture produces); we are disconnected from each other and nature; much of what liberals say seems absurd on the face of it and imposes costs on working-class people; much of the built environment is ugly. Many working class jobs are being outsourced to third world slaves and machines. Here is a beautiful essay about getting the details wrong but the big picture right:https://www.ecosophia.net/an-empire-of-dreams/ . And another. And a third

Looking at the Jama article cited as the first step in the "proof" that the VAERS data is off by at least a factor of 50-150 (actually could be as high as 200 if we take the lower tail of the 95% confidence interval of the Jama study and the higher tail of the 95% confidence interval of the CDC VAERS), it is only one study. There are several others (see comments below) that show much lower 1.3-8x URFs, so why cherry pick this one?

Next, Steve Kirsch, Jessica Rose, Mathew Crawford cite a letter they wrote to the CDC "sidestepped this question". How is this proof of sidestepping without showing the CDC response? A few sentences later, they contradict themselves by saying the CDC "chose not to respond to the letter.". Perhaps this is an oversight, giving the wrong link, but it doesn't help establish their credibility. And also the people looking at this google doc, should have caught it, and the fact they didn't just affirms my growing suspicion (I have no data on this, admitted) that people are increasingly unable to read (youtube and tik tok have rotted people's brains) and use critical thinking.

Onward, though I should probably stop here given what we've seen already. The authors then pretend (dishonesty, they also bring in an earlier higher January estimate from CDC that is non sequitur, they don't use it, but it does obfuscate things) like they.have an independent estimate, but it's really the same data from the JAMA article, and a slightly updated estimate (lower) from VAERS, so instead of 50x they now get only a 41x difference.

Then they cite a japanese study, which besides the low statistical significance mentioned earlier (quote from paper:"Statistical analysis was not performed due to the small number of subjects with anaphylaxis.")

, also has a systemic problem that the participants are all Japanese and "The underlying reasons of such high incidence of anaphylaxis in Japan are unknown, but the presence of polyethylene glycol (PEG) additive,7 which is also used in many cosmetic and pharmaceutical products is considered to be one of the reasons for inducing anaphylaxis by the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine. Of the 37 HCWs who developed anaphylaxis, 57% had some history of allergy, and four patients had a history of cosmetics allergy, suggesting the potential involvement of PEG." I am guessing that PEG is not used in the US vaccines, or else the Japanese are more allergic to it, or else there is no statistical significance to this study to differentiate their numbers from the CDC numbers.

Next we go to VAERS to see how many deaths after vaccination are actually being reported in 2021.  I did my own analysis here, but I will go back to look at what the authors of the paper actually do later. Most of the people who are reported dying after the vaccine are older people who could have died from the strain of going to the clinic or wherever they were vaccinated, if not at home. As a control of we can look at the number of people dying from causes that could have any possible connection with the vaccine, such as infections, respiratory ailments, circulatory ailments, etc.  in 2019, before the covid madness (It would be great if there was also data for 2020 and 2021, but it's not yet available on the wonder.cdc.gov site). The average of deaths in 2019 per 10 day period is about 39536 for people over 50. This is much bigger, more than a factor of 10 bigger than the number of deaths being reported for older people in connection with the vaccine, in the 10 day period between vaccination and death--3115-- so signal is swamped out by noise/background for the elderly population (there were very little deaths (<100 in ten day period after vaccination) reported into VAERS in 2020, and very little vaccines). There was a similar low signal compared to background for other age groups.

This, combined with a friend's analysis:

"The basic idea is, there is a separate reporting system for ALL deaths.  If you compare deaths in 2020-2021 to recent previous years, you see big bumps in deaths that correspond pretty closely (like w/in 10-20% or better) to the official Covid count.  That disproves:

Claims that vaccines are killing many people.  If that were true, we would see a big uptick in death in spring 2021 when lots of people were vaccinated.  We didn’t.

 Oh and they want to argue that the CDC is just lying about the numbers?  But the CDC gets their numbers from the states.  If the numbers were fake, why aren’t any of these states run by Republican governors who have been resisting social distancing and vaccine mandates haven’t uncovered any fake numbers?"

closes my mind somewhat to more evidence from the anti vaxxers. Not completely closed though, but a mind has only so much space and time. 

I was going to see if I can make $1M from this guy's bet (S. Kirsch, whom you printed the doc on the kitchen table for) that 150K-200K and counting people have died from the covid vaccine. But he is sooooo dishonest. Here are the fine detail terms of his bet (this is the "switch", contradicting the "bait"):

"1. That the vaccines are so deadly that they should be stopped because they kill more than 1 person per million fully vaccinated

2. That nobody on the planet actually believes that the CDC is telling the truth" So (1) means that out of about 200 million people fully vaccinated, more than 200 have died. Yes, almost certainly more than 200 have died. That is very different than his bait claim of 150-200K and counting dead from covid vaccine! WTF! And there is no way to disprove (2) except by taking polls, and maybe it's true, but irrelevant to what is actually about the number of people dying. I'm sorry, but this guy is just showing ill will. I'm disappointed, because I thought I had a chance to win 1M dollars.

This guy has an interest in making money from promoting his own treatments:

In Mid-2020, Kirsch founded the Covid-19 Treatment Fund (CETF) to fund research into off-label treatments for Covid-19:

•  "This tech millionaire went from covid trial funder to misinformation superspreader". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 24 October 2021.

So I did look at the main concern with the PCR protocol from this link that you sent me, namely the Ct values. The authors are either ignorant or intentionally misleading. They cite a paper which I include here (pcr2) as their proof that one gets a 97% false positive rate with Ct=35. What that paper actually shows is that for people who have been infected with covid, detection of the virus at Ct=35 only means they are still infectious for less than 3% of them. But they still almost certainly (with less than 2% error) have pieces of dead virus in them that are being detected with the PCR test. They are either misunderstanding or intentionally misusing the meaning of "false positive". It means that someone who does not have any of the covid viral RNA in their nose is still tested as positive with the PCR test (The WHO has set the false positive limit as less than 2%, not 97% as these guys erroneously claim). It does not mean that the person is still infectious.

So you can't say that because of Ct values above 30, the actual cases of covid are much less than reported with PCR tests. You can say that out of those tested positive, some will not be infectious anymore (especially those with Ct values>30), and less than 2% of them will actually be falsely positive and have no covid RNA in them. But so what? Lower Ct values may be appropriate if what you care about is infectiousness, but if you care about finding whether there is any covid RNA in a person, you need higher Ct values so as to minimize false negatives, not just false positives.

I have no further motivation to look at the other claims against PCR testing (bad primers, erroneous GC content and Tm, etc) that they harp about. This was the major one listed in the initial email that you sent me, and there is no reason to believe that the people doing this testing are morons, misusing a technology that is the most accurate one we have for RNA detection and that has been around for a while. I am including another paper  (PCR1)that talks about how and why false positives can happen, in case you are interested.

Thanks for the reply. I am responding now but this is my last.

I know I sent other material....We can agree on some and leave the rest..

I appreciate your efforts here but lets please move on to more productive non-covid issues, such as the community plan there.

Sure, but we must be able to figure out disagreements, not just "agree to disagree". That doesn't work for most things when people are in a community. It works for things like religion or artistic taste, but anytime we will share work or resources, we need to be able to come to agreement otherwise we will be getting in each other's way.

 

 

 1.The CDC is dropping the PCR test as of 12/31/2021 in favor of other tests. https://www.dailyveracity.com/2021/07/27/the-cdc-is-abandoning-the-pcr-test/

Most test sites are apparently still using it though.

Nope, that is absolutely not what the CDC is doing. See email from Larry. 

 

2. Test results without clinical observations of symptoms are meaningless.

Nope. PCR test is THE MOST SENSITIVE test we have of someone having contracted the virus. It does not mean they are still having live virus in them, but that NOT what the CDC ever claimed. IT is the most accurate number for estimating how many people got infected. Whether they are still infected with live virus at the time of the test is irrelevant for that estimate. 

This was always a "casedemic" of bullshit stats as put forth by MSM.

You have been duped by the Chinese, the Russians or some other disinformation spreader (or your friend the multibillionaire, what's his name, Kirsch). It is heartbreaking. I gave you specific reasons WHY the PCR claims were mistaken. Do you at least understand what I was saying about the double entendre of false positive?

No one is denying the PCR will detect virus, it is how that is interpreted. The detection of covid RNA "pieces of dead virus” alone may be technically accurate but is meaningless in terms of an actual sickness or infectiousness. Infectiousness is what has hyped this from day one;  it is the key issue.  A ‘case’ that is simply a positive test result of dead virus is not a case of anything.

Not at all. It was all about estimating the number of people who got the virus at some point, within a margin of 2% (the maximum number of false positives as defined by pieces of viral RNA not in patient, but test says they are). The only time people care about whether someone is still infected is if they want to see how long they need to be quarantined, which was what the paper the folks who wrote that paper cited. 

Even Fauci admitted the PCR test cycling issue  back in July 2020. 

“Fauci directly responded to a question about COVID-19 testing, specifically how patients with positive tests might determine whether or not they are actually infectious and need to quarantine.

“What is now sort of evolving into a bit of a standard,” Fauci said, is that “if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more … the chances of it being replication-[competent] are minuscule.”

Yes, so what? We all agree on this. 

“It’s very frustrating for the patients as well as for the physicians,” he continued, when “somebody comes in, and they repeat their PCR, and it’s like [a] 37 cycle threshold, but you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle.

So, I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it’s just dead nucleotides, period.” 

https://archive.is/AhkDV#selection-1179.52-1191.121

But most likely it means the patient got covid at some point and got over it. There is no other way to get dead virus RNA pieces in you

3. You focused on only one issue of the 10 listed with PCR.

Yes, because I told you you only get one more strike. The universal donut cult can keep making up BS, and it does that mean I have to keep checking every one of their claims.There has to be a limit. But, if you want we can keep talking about the two issues I have looked into, till we come to agreement.

And sent a report that admits in conclusion there are issues.

"Have provided additional evidence that false positive SARS CoV-2 PCR test results do occur in the clinical setting and are especially a problem in a low prevalence screening situation where the prior probability of a positive test is low."

Yes, the whole paper is about whether someone is still infectious or not. It is not about whether someone has virus in them. Out of 100 people without virus, the test will find erroneously, that 2 have virus, whether because of  high Ct, cross contamination, human mislabeling of sample, etc. You and that paper make the claim that the CDC over-estimated the number of people who got covid, not how many are still infectious at time of testing. That is a false claim.

The trauma community and attachment theory

 

The American Psychiatric Association before 1973, thought that homosexuality was a pathology. Some thought that anything that is not close to normal behavior and sexual preference was a pathology. Some Freudians thought that it was an immature behavior that never matured. Freudian ideas are not very scientific, they are not tested by experiments and as a result have little predictive or generalizing power. And the idea that pathology is defined by how close one is to a norm is baseless, or rather it comes from primate group behavior, but has no place in science. So homosexuality is no longer considered a pathology, and perhaps due to this episode it has become politically incorrect to classify any behavior or way of being as pathological. Could we have gone too far though? Maybe it can be useful to classify some behaviors as pathological. It seems to me that the following 2 criteria are a good way to view pathology:

1. When a person is repeatedly hurting themselves with said behavior or internal process.

2. When a person is repeatedly hurting another person, not in self defense (though this might be tricky to define for avoidants, who see any intimacy as an attack).

and perhaps a third which we will discuss later.

Our goal in studying pathology should not be to shame, ostracize, judge or ridicule the pathological person, but rather to understand and help them heal. Understanding involves making distinctions (and also integration of distinct things sometimes). Not all pathologies are the same either in their etiologies or their manifestations. If we can understand, we can sometimes also find ways to heal. Scientific theories like attachment theory offer a finer tool for understanding than pure psychological theories. Attachment theory has been evolving through the interplay of theory and experiment for many decades and offers us a two axis model of infant and adult attachment. Evolutionary theory posits that mother-child, and lover-lover attachment use the same neuro-hormonal-behavioral systems, maybe with a slight modification. In a species where newborns take years to be able to survive on their own, it makes sense that a strong attachment system has evolved between mother and child. It also makes sense that this attachment system would be tweaked (instead of invented de novo) to recruit (potential) fathers to help mothers, hence romantic love. I'm not saying that romantic love can be reduced to hormones and neural states, only that these are part of a system that keeps lovers attached, when all goes well during childhood (there are other aspects like being inspired by one's partner that are absent in childhood--the Muse). If the system malfunctions, people can develop a so-called avoidant attachment along one axis, and a so-called anxious attachment along another perpendicular axis*. And of coarse most people will be a combination of both attachment styles, off both of these axes. People can heal from these malfunctions (not pathologies yet) by learning how to have a more secure attachment, but what or whom do we form a connection to?

But wait, before we get to healing, why is having a high avoidance or anxiousness coordinate (as measured by surveys, but also by brain scans, not just for activity, but for avoidants, for mu opioid receptors) a pathology? Because both of these kinds of people (sometimes combined into one, aka chaotic or disorganized attachment) hurt both themselves and their romantic partners or close friends. They hurt themselves by not being able to have intimate romantic relationships or close friendships, and are unhappier in a romantic relationship than secure people. They also have a lower resilience to post-childhood stressors**. Same goes for their hurting their partner, even if the latter have secure attachment (when both coordinates are low valued). Not being able to have romantic relationships may not in itself be hurtful to oneself if one can compensate for this innate human need to connect. Perhaps they can connect to a higher power or children or pets, or an online tribe. Still it is suspicious that most of these people try (and sometimes succeed with the right therapy) to have romantic relationships, even as they ostensibly disavow their need to do so. 

There is no contradiction between having a pathology, and having that pathology originate in adaptive behavior during childhood or infancy. Of course the behavior was adaptive and protective when it arose. But now it can be harmful sometimes. 

But instead of using attachment theory to propose different treatments for people suffering from PTSD or other trauma-related ailments, the trauma community*** has adopted a one-size-fits-all treatment. What works for avoidance-meditation, somatic therapies and attachment to guru, or source, is different than what works for anxious or chaotic-attachment to partner with some agreements, though both can benefit from compassionate inquiry and attachment to a therapist.  Also, secure attachment folks can be traumatized from being in a relationship with an avoidant person, not just because of childhood trauma. And what works for them is an understanding that they are dealing with a wounded individual (who now feels legitimized  by the trauma community). 

I've noticed in the trauma community, that it is common to implicitly normalize avoidance (we should not need a partner, a me first, a bit of a narcissistic perspective), while pathologizing anxious attachment (which is co-dependence in the extreme anxious form).  They don't do this explicitly because they don't use attachment theory. They just do it implicitly, watch these videos for example and read my comments (Iuval Clejan):

needing a parter is a sin.

the cause of conflict for avoidants in relationship

Thes videos are coming from the non-dual community, which has much overlap with the trauma community. I've heard similar quips from the trauma gurus, "stay in your lane", "outsourcing taking care of your inner child is immature", or implying that it is crucial to have attachment when an infant or child, but somehow it is only necessary to love yourself and find a connection to source as an adult, not to have any attachments to other adults, that's considered immature. Millions of years of needing that attachment to others in the tribe in order to survive, have left a biological imprint, don't you think? But no, now it is considered cool to be "whole" before entering a relationship, to focus on "loving oneself", and to not need a romantic relationship. It's like breatharians who think eating is gross (or maybe pooping, the result of eating is gross, just like getting hurt by having incoming and outgoing boundary violations from childhood triggered in a romantic relationship is painful), and not needing food is cool. The cool factor is further enhanced by half-baked misunderstood views of eastern philosophies. Non-attachment to them meant something different, as they were collectivist cultures, where it was obvious that people needed each other. In our hyper-individualized western culture, it's not so obvious.

I made a response video

So the trauma community legitimizes these avoidants who are hurting their partners if they have the misfortune of partnering up with them, and now feel entitled to do it, while shaming anxious people (for being immature). Both anxiousness and avoidance are pathologies, coming from different kinds of childhood traumas (incoming vs outgoing boundary violations). Perhaps the double standard is there because most of the people in the trauma community are avoidants whose worse nightmare is having anxious, co-dependent partners who trigger their childhood traumas of needing the adults but the adults hurt them with incoming boundary violations (being immobilized, force-fed, molested, abused or gaslighted). Or perhaps the double standard is because there are also a fair number of anxious folks in this community who are paired up with avoidants (a common occurrence that these two attract each other) and think they should be less needy in order for the relationship to work, they don't want to think badly of their partner. Is having an anxious attachment or being paired up with an anxious attachment person, make one go to the other extreme, of thinking that we "don't need a partner", or should not need anything from a partner? The optimal solution is somewhere in the middle between being totally self-sufficient, and totally dependent on our partner.

The other thing you hear commonly in the trauma community is to focus on loving yourself. Loving yourself first is not a solution for avoidant or anxious attachment (more for anxious though) but a bandaid, as far as I can tell. We are social beings whose very individuality emerges from a family or tribe. Native people knew this. The existence or non existence of a God or Source or Presence is irrelevant to this, though it helps avoidants to connect with this Source (irrelevant whether it has an existence independent of their imagination) and it helps them to feel love from this source. Secure folks feel self love by default. They still need their partner to love them in a relationship, because this is a different need than self love, or love of or from a higher power, or love to and from a tribe. Or does it not matter where connection comes from as long as there is connection? Perhaps this IS a case where one "size" fits all?

Why are some people able to deal with adult traumas better than others? It seems like the answer is secure attachment during childhood to at least one adult human. This is also part of the field of resilience. But resilience is not talked about much in the trauma community. This is rather self serving because it creates a bigger market for trauma healing through revisiting childhood traumas, since now even secure attachment folks must do it, even though they may not need to. And instead of insecure attachment folks actually healing and being able to have good romantic relationships, they become dependent on the meditation and trauma and entheogen workshops (which also offer a sort of tribal connection). The anxious people never quite heal because they think that what they want (a secure attachment to a partner) is a pathology, whereas the avoidants never heal because they think they are already healthy, or that they need to have stronger boundaries (which were helpful in childhood, but will prevent them from having romantic relationships, which need also vulnerability, not just clear communication about what one needs, which is what "boundaries" usually means when the term is used by adults). I'm not saying any of this is intentional and comes from devious motives. All the people I've met in the trauma community really want to help people. But they are legitimizing psychopaths (I'm using that word to mean someone with a psychological pathology, in a loving way. I've had quite a few romantic partners who had avoidant attachment due to childhood trauma), and preventing them from healing.

Lastly, for avoidants, meditation and somatic therapies can also be a way to avoid re-evaluating (integrating the shadow in Jung's terms) the original traumas so it's not always helpful, as the trauma gurus suggest. My therapist calls it transcendental dis-identification, where those negative feelings are suppressed instead of experienced in a different, more helpful way. Some people have called this technique, spiritual bypass. "Breathe into the negativity, and dissolve it..." (works during the meditation, but not when dealing with a someone who triggers you)

Getting back to the idea that insecure attachment is a pathology: what if the whole world became avoidant (I'm thinking this is not just hypothetical, as capitalism promotes the kind of trauma that leads to avoidant attachment) and dealt with it the way the trauma gurus say, through self love, compassionate inquiry, meditation, entheogens and other somatic therapies (like tapping and EMDR)? Would it then still be a pathology if these folks just didn't have romantic relationships, or had shallow, not-so-intimate ones with parallel play (a stage of childhood development that avoidants can get stuck in)? I think yes, because the third criterion I propose for a pathology is that it is a conflict between deep programs that have evolved over eons and are hard to change, and new environments that temporarily call for new adaptations. For example, global capitalism calls for hyper-individuals, and that conflicts with our tribal and pair-bonding evolutionary heritage. And only in that kind of culture can people pretend that they don't need each other (they still do, but often the material needs are abstract. Instead of depending on your family member or neighbor, you depend on someone in a factory far away). Erich Fromm noticed this kind of pathology in modern day western societies first. And the solution is not personal healing of individuals, but a new way to live (which can begin with a new "story", but must not end there). Personal "healing" of individuals might actually do more harm than good, if this "healing" is but an adjustment of individuals to a sick society.

There is also the possibility that a pathology could become an advantage (like beneficial mutations in biology). For example, it might lead to great art, science or music. This was exemplified in the movie Clockwork Orange, where a psychopath is also able to appreciate Beethoven, but once his pathology is "cured" so is his appreciation of Beethoven. In the case of avoidant or chaotic, attachment  it may be that these people have an enhanced ability to experience mystical realms of consciousness. Aldous Huxley and Stanislaw Grof postulted that the brain is not just for information processing, but for information blocking; information coming from the mystical realm, that doesn't offer immediate survival benefits in certain environments. Perhaps mu-opioid receptors (which are scarce in avoidant brains) are part of this blocking mechanism. So a deeper question would be, what if the whole world became mystics, due to becoming avoidant, and the efforts of therapists to focus on individual healing alone, without social healing? This seems unrealistic to me. A more likely scenario is that those who have not healed their trauma will outcompete the mystics... And this is why we must also focus on creating social alternatives.

* This is a refinement to Ainsorth's original 3 category model. She saw secure, avoidant and "chaotic" (aka disorganized, a combination of anxious and avoidant) attachment, the latter at a much higher frequency (this makes sense statistically) than pure anxious, which she missed.

** See data in Love Sense by Sue Johnson

*** The disciples of Gabor Mate, Thomas Hubl, Dan Siegel, Stephen Porges, Peter Levine, the SAND organization and others. There is significant overlap with the non-dual community (disciples of Tolle, Adyashanti, Mooji, Spira, Almaas). Not sure yet about Van der Kolk, seems like his somatic therapies are especialy helpful for avoidants, but ultimately they still need to feel connected to other adult humans. To call this group a community does not mean they act in a coordinated fashion. What I mean is that most of the consumers of the services offered by the trauma and non-dual gurus have certain traits in common, like fear of intimacy with adults (and all kinds of defense mechanisms that prevent intimacy), being easily overwhelmed by the material world, hyper-defensiveness (feeling attacked when nobody means to attack them), constantly having to assert their boundaries, being controlling of partners, being attracted to people with anxious attachment in romantic relationships, ease in connecting with nature or a higher power (an advantage), and other traits shared by people with avoidant attachment. Sometimes also traits shared by people with anxious attachment, like codependence, and abandonment trauma. And then there are exceptions, like Esther Perel, Bruce Perry and Brene Brown who talk about vulnerability and the insanity of rugged individualism. And therapists like Sue Johnson and Stan Tatkin who recognize the primacy of intimate bonds in romantic partership.