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The Conspiracist's Dilemma

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  Between 1970 and the early 1990s, an estimated 30,000 people in the UK were given blood or blood products infected with HIV or hepatitis C. Some 3,000 died as a direct consequence. An inquiry commenced in 2018 has finally produced its report, and it is damning. Blood was not routinely tested for HIV until 1986, hepatitis C following 5 years later.  A significant source of the contamination was imported blood, particularly from America which paid donors, incentivising donation from drug users, for example.  Brian Langstaff's report lays much of the blame for the problem with Government, but medical staff and the NHS as a whole come in for criticism. All of which will be music to a conspiracist's ears. A nice juicy medical scandal, involving government, undermining trust in the medical profession... those who call for a similar inquiry into harms from vaccination - a call I would not necessarily oppose - will see many parallels,  and vindication of their suspicions that 'th
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Sex - a Matter of Perspective

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I am sure that many readers have already concluded that I do not understand the role of sex in either organic or biotic evolution. At least I can claim, on the basis of the conflicting views in the recent literature, the consolation of abundant company. - George C. Williams, Sex and Evolution, 1975    What's sex all about? This question has been exercising biologists since well before Williams's time, but in the 1970's, with the rise of ‘ gene-centrism ’ and the related controversy over group selection , a succession of prominent authors grappled with the problem, trying to fit it with current evolutionary theory to no-one's particular satisfaction. Males were deemed an impediment to a female's efforts to maximise her reproductive output, time wasted on these feckless types resulting in her only passing on 50% of her genes per offspring. From the perspective of a ‘selfish gene', meanwhile, getting into every offspring seems a preferable fate to on
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Jabbed/dead on the same day?

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A popular habit amongst certain ... people is to amplify reports where someone had a vaccine and died within a short period after. Of course, they take no care to check what the background rate might be given no correlation. Essentially, this is an 'overlap' problem: the likelihood of intersect between two sets m (today's vaccinees) and n (today's deaths) drawn independently from a population N. Since you only die once, or get vaccinated once on any given day, it is sampling without replacement.  Let's take the US.  N is 330 million.  m (set 1) is the number of vaccinations in a day, say 1 million.  n (set 2) is the number of cardiovascular deaths a day, which is about 2380.  So what's the probability that at least 1 person in the 'vaccinated today' set will also be in the 'death today' set? The calculation itself is fiddly***, but I like this  calculator . The example is picking marbles, but it is much the same thing. There are 330 million '
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Jumping at shadows

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I've been directed to a rather rambling piece by  Robert Malone , nominally about pseudouridine but it takes a while to get there as the first half is about his favourite subject: Robert Malone. I can see from that segment where the 'inventor calls mRNA gene therapy ' trope probably comes from, because he does discuss the use of nucleic acid delivery systems in gene therapy. But this does not make RNA vaccines gene therapy: gene therapy involves the complementation or repair of defective host DNA genes, and the mRNA vaccines do not contain such genes, nor even any DNA. Malone has legitimate concerns about DNA-based gene therapy's safety, and points out that genotoxicity studies are required by the FDA, as it is potentially carcinogenic. These studies were not required for RNA vaccines because RNA should not affect DNA, and RNA is normally degraded in a matter of hours. Of course, anyone who has been following along will be aware that a Swedish study  has been touted by
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Semantics

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A common feature of pseudoscientific discourse is to obsess over definitions - as if what you call something has any bearing on what it is . Two such ideas in particular stand out in the area of nucleic acid-based vaccination: "Experimental gene therapy" and "It's not a vaccine".  Now, though I think these strategies particularly lame, I could also pick a fight with an empty room, so I am happy to tackle them on their own terms! The oddest part of these oft-twinned notions is that the first demands extension of a definition, while the second complains about that very same thing... Experimental gene therapy. Tacking 'experimental' on the front is evidently an attempt to discredit by a pejorative. Yet there is no sense in which these vaccines are still 'experimental'. They have completed Phase lll trials, in which two groups are respectively given the treatment or placebo (or, more generally, 'standard of care'), and relative benefit is as
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Land of Confusion

The sheer determination of people to be confused by the straightforward is quite something to behold. Contrarian Twitter has been beside itself with self-righteous fury because it believes pregnant women have 'quietly' been advised against vaccination by the UK government. But here's the actual timeline. December 2020 - pregnant women were advised against vaccination, other than in cases of significant risk.  April 2021 - pregnant women were now to be invited along with their age group. December 2021 - in view of high numbers of unvaccinated pregnant women in ICU, they were made a priority. Simple, huh? Not if you're a contrarian.  As part of Emergency Authorisation for approval of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine under 'Regulation 174', in December 2020, a report was issued, which included a section on reproductive and developmental toxicity with the following conclusion: The absence of reproductive toxicity data is a reflection of the speed of development to first iden
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I Love the Smell of Confirmation Bias in the Morning

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"Excess deaths" are all over Contrariworld at the moment. Some want to use them to undermine vaccines, others (with overlap to the first group) to undermine lockdowns.  The Daily Telegraph has had the latter in a told-you-so frenzy with a truly awful headline (find the piece yourself!):  " Lockdown feared to be killing more people than Covid" The Twitter version appends 'effects' to 'lockdown', while the piece itself moves rapidly away from lockdown itself to issues related to the effects of the pandemic on healthcare. These would happen, probably more so, in the absence of mitigations, so attributing them to lockdowns is dubious. An inversion of reality, one might say.  The core evidence of a concern is a snippet of the graph of excess deaths - the deaths over and above those expected based upon an average of equivalent recent periods. In this period, the deaths directly attributed to Covid don't account for the whole of the excess. So what is
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