All suppression of debate is suppression of science.

From more jersey switching: "original antigenic sin" now discussed in mainstream media

and so another "fringe conspiracy theory" returns to being canon by el gato malo.

El Gato Malo has been one of the stars of the Covid-19 epistemic firmament.  He followed the science, examined the data, and spoke up clearly when all about him were deferring to authority and professing that which they knew to be untrue.

perhaps the most stunning social issue issue of the last 3 years was not the widespread, uncritical submission of humanity to authority. anyone who has read their milgram and their asch saw that coming a mile away.

what amazed me most was the near instant pivot of entire fields of science away from that which has been known for 100 years and the adoption of literal fantasy in its place.

they took the diametric opposite of pretty much every epidemiological and biological precept and ran with it. suddenly, lockdowns worked, masks stopped spread, you could rush a vaccine to market and save lives by administering it during a pandemic, mRNA was well tested and safe, closing schools and banning travel, and forcing bizarre 6 foot space limits were all canon and always had been.

and no one stood up. the “experts” who damn well knew better went silent or flounced up to gleefully grasp the reins of power by cheerleading for the lysenkoization of medicine and the overturn of evidence in favor of fabulism.

I followed his pieces from near the beginning and found him open, data based, and willing and prepared to be wrong.  Not infrequently he would hedge his declarations with something along the lines of "this isn't my field and I may be wrong but based on X it appears . . . ".

My running and unchecked tally is that he got almost everything right.  

One of the early red flags he raised was the somewhat esoteric issue of original antigenic sin.  

the point of “science” is to remove emotion and adjudicate facts with dispassion, but the flaw in the system is not the method but the membership: science is done by humans and it turns out that “experts” are more, not less prone to being subsumed by asch and milgram than even “the lay.”

i doubt this owes to some defect in their constitutions. rather, i suspect it’s an artifact of their situations: they are members of groups, bodies, and agencies whose bread is buttered by the state and other such authoritarian institutions. they are dependent for accreditation, publication, and funding and subject to intense pressure for orthodoxy. step out of line and you’re anathema: unfunded, unpublished, and cast out to wander in solitary ignominy. don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

and this has the effect of utterly stifling debate. it renders topics taboo and research verboten. it flat out flips large pools of well established science on their heads and puts their canon in the hands of ideologues and grifters. that which was known becomes a conspiracy theory. that which was known to be wrong becomes the truth that may not be questioned.

and this is not the road to positive outcomes.

suddenly the same people who call gender a social construct but race intrinsic claim there is no such thing as “natural immunity” and those who hope for pfuture pfizer pfunding claim that “original antigenic sin” is a made up theory and that there is no way a leaky vaccine could rapidly drive such trends while hiding the evidence that this was EXACTLY what was happening.

[snip]

of all the topics that kicked the vaccine zealot beehive, this one really took the cake. the idea that vaccines were causing immune fixation that then drove viral evolution in directions to take advantage of it and rapidly rendered the vaccinated more, not less likely to contract and spread covid really set people off. it was proof you had to be a kook and some kind of “anti-vaxxer” with lunatic ideas about how immunity works.

it would get you booted by the bluebird.

what a difference a year can make…

And indeed he was booted from Twitter for a short time.

Big announcement!

Twitter suspended El Gato Malo (@boriquagato) for sharing data that shows lockdowns and masks don't work

But you can now follow him on Substack:https://t.co/xrpSejBLJA

— Bachman (@ElonBachman) March 28, 2021

And is now coming to light, possibly he, and certainly many others, were booted at the insistence of the government.  

but imagine how different things might be had we been able to have this debate from the outset.

because we could have.

the simple fact is that this was always simple science. it’s neither far fetched nor speculative. it’s actually REALLY simple and has been known since 1960.

Original antigenic sin, also known as antigenic imprinting or the Hoskins effect,[1] refers to the propensity of the body's immune system to preferentially utilize immunological memory based on a previous infection when a second slightly different version of that foreign pathogen (e.g. a virus or bacterium) is encountered. This leaves the immune system "trapped" by the first response it has made to each antigen, and unable to mount potentially more effective responses during subsequent infections. Antibodies or T-cells induced during infections with the first variant of the pathogen are subject to a form of original antigenic sin, termed repertoire freeze.

it was basic, well understood canon studied in influenza for generations.

it’s a flat out obvious outcome.

and yet when certain internet felines were asking this back in the fall of 2021, boy did the heat kick up.

His experience underlines that the the scientific method underpinned by the cultural values of tolerance, free speech, free assembly, freedom of belief, empiricism, etc. was always the right way to approach the issue despite the authoritarian repression preferred by most governments.

and look, i’m not some hoskins effect wonk. this is not even my area of expertise (though it is adjacent to some). it was, like many things, just really pretty easy to figure out if you took the time to look with an open mind that happened to be attached to the open mouth of a mouthy internet cat.

it sounds funny, but that latter part is more important than people realize. i hardly had this all sussed from the jump. it took discussions and arguments and debate and challenge. it too reading other people’s ideas and having them read and tear into mine. that’s where science is done and how amateurs become expert. it’s how we unbury ourselves from mountains of woo-woo and figure out what’s real.

but this takes discourse.

all suppression of debate is suppression of science.

and because that was the course we took, the world got so many things so badly wrong.

there are an awful lot of people who should have been screaming about this the instant it became clear that the vaccines were leaky because this is what leaky vaccines do. honestly, far more people should have been screaming about the very idea of using a vaccine mid-pandemic to try to stop spread because it’s outright contra-indicated.

but no one wanted to hear this.

 

[snip]

yet for the better part of a year, even mentioning that this was a debate worth having was all but impossible in public.

referencing a near century of studies was deemed “denialist zealotry” and most people simply shut you out at that point and stopped listening.

and that made heading this off while we still could impossible.

obviously, the time to explore such issues is before you jab 2 billion people, not after. “ready, fire, aim” is not a useful mantra for possibly permanent health interventions especially not when they run counter to a century of settled science.

OAS was one of the concepts with which I was largely unaware pre-Covid and almost certainly was introduced to it by el gato malo.  El gato malo was properly circumspect.  His early OAS pieces were hedged with disclaimers such as "this isn't my area but it appears . . ." and "I may be wrong but it seems from the data that . . . "  He wasn't a zealot.  He explored.  And argued.  And debated.  And researched.  

As we now wish the purported "experts" had done.

but more than anything, more than any scientific precept or pandemic preparedness, we learned about experts.

almost none are the brave captains that save the plane when the engines flame out. most freeze up and do exactly the wrong thing either from panic or mis-incentive. there is not some group of wise sages (sorry, pun irresistible) that is ready to lead you to safety.

there is groupthink and panic and capture.

and so in times of crisis, trust yourself. trust your faculties and your sense. assess what is being said, by whom, and to what purpose for it may be something widely divergent from “fixing the crisis.” eschew those who seek to censor, that is never the side of science. and check your own assumptions too. we all get some things wrong. there is no shame in this. the shame lies in failing to assess and adapt, to evaluate and evolve.

minds fixate just like immune systems and systems of public health are positively sclerotic.

the mob and the overton window it permits can become deranged. decline the initiation to go with it.

it turns out that the ability to keep one’s head when all others around them are losing theirs is basically a superpower.

cultivate yours.

 I appreciate the oblique allusion to Ruyard Kipling's If.