Epistemic chaos and the Delta Variant, Part III
Is the spike protein toxic? Will it melt your ovaries? The Cosmopolitan Globalist answers your questions.
By Claire Berlinski and Yuri Deigin, from Paris and Moscow
Yesterday, my co-author Yuri Deigin and I published an article in Quillette titled, Looking for Covid19 miracle drugs? We already have them. They’re called vaccines.
Let’s introduce the cast of characters. Bret Weinstein is a former professor of biology in the United States. His podcasts have a significant reach. Some episodes have been downloaded five million times.
Recently, he and his guests advanced a complex theory intertwining the claim that ivermectin is a miracle cure for Covid19 with the idea that mRNA and adenovirus-vector vaccines are “toxic” and, in the words of a report Weinstein cites approvingly, “unsafe for human use.” The danger is grave, Weinstein intones. There is a conspiracy to obscure these truths from the public.
Weinstein is best known for having been driven off his own college campus by a horde of aroused zombies. He was right to say, at the time, that the ideology by which they were inspired (some species of Woke drivel) was a dangerous one that would not stay confined to college campuses. He can say, “I told you so.”
Well before the view became socially permissible, he maintained that SARS-CoV-2 might have emerged from a laboratory. For more than a year, esteemed purveyors of Upper West Side opinions denounced this idea as heresy; the social media giants censored anyone who voiced it. Insofar as Facebook and Twitter no longer say this is Badthink, he can again say, “I told you so.”
Quillette is an online magazine that attracts readers who enjoy a brisk, heterodox argument, along with a substantial number of readers who view the FDA’s endorsement of vaccinations as prima facie evidence of their lethality.
Then there’s Yuri. Co-author of the paper, The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin, he is a hero not only to people who agree with him for good reasons, but to people who haven’t read a word of the paper but liked what they read. People of this disposition are often susceptible to the notion of a giant conspiracy involving Big Pharma, Big Tech, and all the world’s governments.
So as you might imagine, our timelines on Twitter have recently been populated by readers who are appalled—et tu, Quillette?—that Yuri and I have been captured by Big Pharma. The conspiracy runs unimaginably deep.
Some of the people who wrote to us, though, are not crazy. They’ve just been scared witless by Weinstein’s endorsement of the words, “unsafe for human use.” They don’t know who to trust. Weinstein’s got a Ph.D. in biology. They don’t. He’s been right before. Or close enough. Among his guests have been doctors who sound quite medical. What if they’re right?
If you’re one of those people, welcome to the Cosmopolitan Globalist. Here’s Part I of our series on the spread of the anti-vaccination movement. Here’s Part II. If you like us, please subscribe.
The master narrative
If you’re hearing arguments that Covid19 vaccinations are dangerous, you should know these arguments aren’t new, even though they’re new vaccines. Anti-vaccination activists have made the same claims about every vaccine since Edward Jenner administered the first vaccine against smallpox in 1796.
The vocabulary for remonstrating against mRNA vaccines has been updated, but only slightly. Professional anti-vaxxers—the ones who decry vaccines against polio, measles, and mumps—have been open about their goal; they see Covid19 as an unparalleled opportunity to bring their case to a wider public. Here’s their case.
The Argument:
When the vaccine debuts: “It’s too soon to tell if it’s safe.”
No matter how long it’s been around: “It’s too soon to gauge the long-term effects.”
Any misfortune, illness, or death they’ve heard about: Caused by the vaccine.
Any misfortune, illness, or death they haven’t heard about: Millions of them, obviously, but we’re not hearing about them because the evidence has been suppressed.
The vaccine contains toxins. (Advanced: cytotoxins.)
The disease does not exist. It is all a hoax. (Either perpetrated by the government, to control you, or by Big Pharma to sell you vaccines, or both.)
Okay, it exists, but the risks have been grossly exaggerated.
Besides, it only happens to other people.
I have found a mathematical mistake or an accounting error that explains why the death toll from this disease seems to be so high.
I have found a paper in a peer-reviewed journal that proves this vaccine is toxic. (Advanced: I have found a meta-study that proves this vaccine is toxic.)
There is a safe, inexpensive miracle cure for this disease that doesn’t involve a vaccine. Big Pharma is hiding it from you. (Extra point if this cure is “natural,” two points each for “vitamins,” “holistic,” and “gut health.”)
Big Pharma controls the government.
The media, too.
I am the only one who has the courage to speak out because look how I’m stigmatized.
A prestigious doctor agrees with me.
Okay, not a prestigious doctor, but that’s only because they stigmatize anyone who dares speak the truth.
The government knows how dangerous these vaccines are, but they’re in too deep. They can’t admit their mistake.
You shouldn’t stigmatize me for thinking differently. What is this, the Third Reich?
The manufacturers of these vaccines can’t be sued. (Double points if you mention thalidomide or oxycontin.)
Anyone who says otherwise is in the pay of Big Pharma.
Or a mindless sheep who just bleats out the Party Line.
What’s it to you? It’s my body, my choice.
How could you dream of taking a risk like that with children?
But why would that doctor on YouTube lie? What motivation would he have? He’s not in the pay of Big Pharma. I’m going to donate to his non-profit organization for research into Gut-Healthy Covid-killing Spirulina.
I have a good immune system. I don’t need it.
Do you know about VAERS? Look what happens to people who get this vaccine!
The vaccines give kids autism.
The vaccines make you infertile.
I heard of someone who got vaccinated and got a rash.
I heard of someone who got vaccinated and died.
I’m not against vaccinations, I’m just against this vaccination.
You’re asking me to trust the people who got us into Vietnam?
Following Bret Weinstein’s unfortunate leap into the maw, his followers have converged on modest elaborations to the Argument. These ideas have been around forever in anti-vaccination circles, but they’ve been re-dusted with a new luster of medical jargon.
The vaccines weren’t tested on animals before being tested in humans.
The spike protein in the vaccine is toxic.
Do you know about VAERS? Look what happens to people who get this vaccine!
The mRNA vaccines will cause you to miscarry and become infertile because lipid nanoparticles peak in your ovaries.
A guy named Steve Kirsch’s fish guy, his carpet cleaner, and his house cleaner got sick after being vaccinated.
Let us explore these claims.
Were the vaccines tested on animals?
On his podcast, Weinstein says, “We didn’t know that [the vaccine] had skipped the animal trials that might have alerted us to something really dangerous!”
“They didn’t even use the vaccine itself in the animal trials!” marvels his guest, Dr. Robert Malone, who claims to have invented mRNA vaccines.
Sometimes lies catch on because there’s some hint of truth to them. Not this one.
The humoral and cellular immune response following IM administration of BNT162b2 (V9) was investigated in mice and nonhuman primates. The choice and relevance of the mouse for pharmacological animal model studies was based on the in-depth knowledge about the suitability, dosing and immunization regimen of BALB/c mice for RNA-based vaccine development. Non-human primates were chosen as they are a higher-ordered species, more closely related to humans, which may better reflect immune responses in humans. The selection of rats as the toxicology test species is consistent with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidance documents on nonclinical evaluation of vaccines (WHO, 2005). [My emphasis.]
Rats, mice, hamsters, rhesus monkeys, the whole menagerie; into their brains, their hearts, their lungs; in massive doses, vastly higher than we’d ever dream of giving to a human; over and over again. At least it did the poor beasts no harm.
Is the spike protein toxic?
Steve Kirsch, a guest on the podcast, cites “a FOIA request to the Japanese government” that showed the vaccine “doesn’t stay in the shoulder where we all thought it should stay. It goes throughout your entire body, it goes to your brain to your heart.”
The study in question traced the route of lipid nanoparticles in rats, not the spike protein in humans, but in either case, the results are not surprising. Who told him it “stayed in the shoulder?” We’ve understood the circulation of the blood since 1628, when Harvey discovered it. Of course part of an injection will be carried by the blood to the rest of the body.
I’ve reproduced the table on which he bases this claim. Behold: Normal pharmacokinetics. Compare what you see to this study, for example. Roughly similar. No, this is not evidence of a terrible secret hidden from a credulous world. It’s evidence that if you inject rats with blobs of fat at 1,333 times the dose we’d give to humans, a trivial amount ends up in the rats’ organs in roughly the places you’d expect.1
But is the spike protein “toxic?”
The word “toxic” is meaningless unless you specify a dose. Water is toxic in large enough doses. It’s absolutely true that the protein is “toxic,” in the sense that if you have a gazillion of them in your body, you are in deep trouble. But that is the point of immunization.
Viruses and proteins are not alike. A virus replicates. It hijacks your cells and turns them into virus factories. A protein does not do that. Cannot do that.2 In the battle of protein versus immune system, the immune system wins, because the number of proteins is finite. In the battle of virus versus immune system, it all depends how fast you can stop it from replicating. Replication is how a virus survives. It’s the virus’s evolutionary strategy. No virus, no replication, no problem.
Yes, as the result of vaccination, you are exposed to the spike protein. This is the point! Your immune system sees that the protein is an invader and destroys it. It keeps the offender’s mugshot pasted all over town; that way, if it sees him again, it’s prepared to do war. Your guardian antibodies will neutralize that protein on sight. This will prevent the virus from getting inside your cells, where it can create its clone trooper army. This is how vaccines work. It’s how they’ve always worked.
It’s the virus that has the ability to replicate and produce buckets of the spike protein. More importantly, it’s the virus that has the ability to replicate and trigger the cytokine storm that kills you.
The principle of vaccination has been understood since Jenner and cowpox. The principle remains the same. An old-fashioned vaccine—one based on inactivated SARS-CoV-2, for example—would also involve the spike protein. It just wouldn’t cleverly get your own body to make it.
Even better news: There’s no evidence the spike protein is toxic to humans even in very large doses. Anti-vaccination activists have seized upon this study—Single intratracheal exposure to SARS-CoV-2 S1 spike protein induces acute lung injury in K18-hACE2 transgenic mice—as evidence for the argument that the spike protein is toxic. But it shows the opposite. If you inject the lungs of mice with a massive dose of a spike protein—many orders of magnitude larger than the concentration you’d see in vaccinated humans—the mice will have an immune reaction. Then, within days, they’ll recover. The mice are fine.
There’s a good discussion of the “toxic spike protein” idea here. And another one here.
Do not worry about the spike protein.
What about all the dead people in VAERS?
What should you make of claims that the fatalities reported in VAERS—the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System—amount to “more deaths than for all 70 other vaccines combined over the last 30 years?” Anti-vaxxers make this claim of every vaccine, but let’s look at it, anyway. Maybe this time, it’s true.3
As of June 7, VAERS had logged 5,208 unconfirmed reports of death among alleged vaccine recipients. If they had all been caused by the vaccine, that would amount to 0.0017 percent of total vaccine doses administered in the United States.
But of course, they haven’t all been caused by the vaccine. On an average day, all-cause mortality in the United States is about 8,000 people; during the pandemic it has been as as high as 13,000. People die in the natural course of events. If you vaccinate 54 percent of the US population—about 178,000,000 Americans—quite a few of them will die soon thereafter. The only way to conclude that this is owed to the vaccine is patiently to look at every death and see if the deceased died of something you wouldn’t expect.
The raw VAERS data is completely unreliable. (Cause of death: gunshot wounds?) Anti-vaccination websites and their megaphones, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are publicly encouraging their followers to submit reports to VAERS. Frankly, VAERS has probably by now been completely clogged with deliberate misinformation by anti-vaxxers. It has been firmly established that VAERS reports are driven up by media attention. Nothing in VAERS means a thing until the report has been verified by evidence such as autopsy reports, medical records, and a careful review of the patient’s history.
What of the claim that the concerns of anti-vaxxers are so stigmatized that no one reports adverse effects because they assume they can’t be connected to the vaccine?
No. “Healthcare providers are required [to report adverse effects],” says the CDC. Emphasis in the original. The list of events healthcare providers are required to report— this is not a suggestion, it’s a demand—includes, “An important medical event that based on appropriate medical judgement may jeopardize the individual.” So whether or not you think there’s any connection to the vaccine—even if the patient is an obese lifelong chain smoker who’s basically stuck together with Scotch tape—you are required to report that he had a heart attack. As for people who have an adverse effect but don’t see healthcare provider—well, it probably wasn’t so adverse, was it.
Yet the anti-vaxxers are right! There are more deaths than we usually see from a vaccine. I know this before looking at the database. Why? Because usually, we vaccinate people against childhood diseases. This means we vaccinate children. Who did we vaccinate this time? First people in critical care facilities in retirement homes; then the elderly and gravely comorbid. Is it really such a mystery that we see more deaths in this population than we do among toddlers receiving routine immunizations against whooping cough?
Finally—to remind everyone again—you can’t compare these death rates to the normal baseline. The reason we’re vaccinating people in the first place is because a deadly pandemic has killed 622,000 Americans. More people are dying, period, including the unlucky ones who didn’t get their vaccination or the second dose soon enough. Because of Covid19, US life expectancy has declined. This effect will show up in VAERS, just as it would in any population sample.
By the way, if you’re going to pull reports from VAERS and insist they’re meaningful, do the same with ivermectin. VigiBase is the international version of VAERS—a computerized pharmacovigilance system run by the WHO’s Program for International Drug Monitoring. If you want your toes to curl, pull up those ivermectin incidence reports.
Will the vaccine screw up your ovaries?
No. The graph that Steve Kirsch waved around is so misleading you could lose your faith in humanity.
It comes from a study of rats. (Rats, note. Animals. On which the vaccine was tested.) Below is the table of values on which it’s based. What do you notice?
Why only plot the effect on the rats’ ovaries?
The rats’ ovaries were thoroughly examined after these vaccinations. No problems. Fertility? Unaffected. Most importantly, studies that assess the impact of these vaccines on humans have detected no abnormalities.
The V-Safe system is designed to pick up even more reports of adverse effects than VAERS because it regularly asks people after they’ve been vaccinated, by text message, whether they’re experiencing adverse effects. Their pregnancy database had 3,958 participants between December 14, 2020 and February 28, 2021. The rates of adverse pregnancy events were identical among the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
What about his fish guy, his carpet cleaner, and his house cleaner?
Really? What can we say? Everyone we know is fine.
Yuri Deigin is just some guy from Twitter.
Nor is it true that “if you find the lipid nanoparticles that tells you that your drug got to this location.” Messenger RNA is notoriously unstable; that’s why it has to be encased in more durable blobs of fat.
Prion proteins self-replicate—different process, different protein.
VAERS is a system, in the United States, for reporting adverse incidents following vaccination.
Claire’s article is the perfect refutation of the nonsense peddled by the anti-vaccination crowd.
The suggestion that spike protein is toxic is crazy. Humans have been exposed to spike protein which decorates all corona viruses for thousands of years: long before SARS-CoV-2 made its ugly appearance.
The common cold in humans is caused by hundreds of viruses including four viruses in the corona family. All corona viruses use spike protein to gain passages through the cell membrane. If spike protein was toxic we would have suffered long term consequences from exposure to the corona viruses which cause colds. Almost 80 percent of human adults have been exposed to all four corona cold viruses with no long term ill effect from contact with spike protein.
Alpha and beta corona viruses (of which SARS-CoV-2 is a member) are ubiquitous in mammals. Different mammalian species become ill from some of these viruses but not others. Dogs, cats, cattle and many other animals become sick from corona viruses that do not make human beings ill. But the fact that we don’t become ill from these particular corona viruses doesn’t mean we’re not exposed to them. Like all corona viruses, the ones that make animals but not humans ill are decorated with spike protein. If spike protein was toxic there would be consequences to this exposure; there aren’t.
As for mistrust of Pharma, there is simply no better proof of the superiority of the capitalist system then the success of this industry. The number of human diseases conquered or ameliorated by the pharmaceutical industry is too numerous to mention. There is probably not another industry that has alleviated more human suffering than Pharma. There is a good chance that anyone over 50 who is reading these words is alive only because of some form of pharmaceutical intervention. We should be on our hands and knees expressing gratitude for the miracles that the pharmaceutical industry has made possible.
What makes these miraculous pharmaceutical innovations possible?
It’s called capitalism.
Claire’s analysis is instructive as it addresses and counters the content of the anti-vax argument. Few journalists do this, as msm simply dismisses with condescending label - “those Q-Anon freaks”. Concurrent with need for individuals to intelligently weigh evidence is the need for self-discipline within institutions (science and data). I find it tragic that critical institution knowledge legitimate in it’s own right, becomes stigmatized due to institutional posturing in social justice.