Why did the CDC recommend another vaccine dose?
We are overlooking how the next generation of Medical AI is being trained
I have not added a summary to this article as it is mostly speculative and it is not focused on any specific topic.
The CDC’s latest decision to approve another vaccine dose has now departed from even the so called “scientific consensus” and comes with the obvious risk of turning them into something of a laughing stock1.
And of course Florida is not the international outlier in not recommending the new vaccine to <65 year olds (at least for the non-high risk) but the US CDC is. So why does the US media treat DeSantis and Florida like they are the extremists? (yes, I know the answer and it’s found in the intro of this post)
Recently Alex Berenson wrote a Substack article with a possible explanation2.
Medical AI Training Datasets
I would now like to offer the perspective of someone who is completely outside the medical system3.
I think people are simply not paying attention to how all this information is getting into “published literature”, which is in turn used to train the next generation of “Medical AI”.
Suppose you profit from the Pharma ecosystem, you can achieve a LOT by sanitizing the medical literature and trying to cull all criticism of mRNA vaccines from the training data. Remember, the mRNA market is projected to be a trillion dollar market in a few years.
So here is my theory4:
I think every additional vaccine approval automatically adds to the existing body of medical literature which supports the view that the mRNA vaccine is “safe and effective”. It also produces a “winner take all” effect as these initial set of papers get a lot of citations and tend to crowd out dissenting viewpoints over time.
At this stage, the actual vaccine uptake5 is just a bonus for Pharma companies, given that the governments are usually paying for the vaccines directly and the vaccine manufacturer does not incur any direct loss (to the best of my knowledge).
How close were we to a “counter-mRNA-narrative” GPT?
Interestingly, AI is also simultaneously becoming “too affordable” - in other words, it is becoming a bit too inexpensive for laypeople to create “counternarrative” GPTs.
At the normal rate of research output from the folks who do LLM research, we were probably only a few months away from creating a hobbyist GPT which would have been able to analyze every last piece of information published by health agencies during COVID19 and using it against them!
Before that could happen, the researchers started talking about “AI Risk” to slow down the pace of research output. I do think AI risk is real, but it is a bit hard to ignore the fact that most of the cutting-edge LLM research is being done in the same organizations which have also engaged in censorship of vaccine injuries.
How close were we to a counter-mRNA-narrative GPT, and how much has it been slowed down? I suppose we might never know.
Pharma companies play a really long game
Getting governments to pay for the vaccines by completely bypassing the (obviously reluctant) consumer is a good example of how much of a long game Pharma plays.
In fact, I have almost developed a grudging respect for it because Pharma companies have now become frighteningly good at offloading risks to an unsuspecting public. And we already saw that during COVID19.
I appreciate all the insights we have gotten from
on this topic over the last year or so.But one of the things that really got me thinking about this topic was this (emphasis mine):
Medicine is a very complex subject, and it is very time-consuming for every doctor to catch up with science because there is an information overload concerning science and medicine. You must understand that doctors are extremely busy with patients/paperwork. They only have a little time to read and critically analyze Clinical Papers/Research etc.
In other words, you have all these extremely busy “Key Opinion Leaders”.
Sometimes all you really need to do to influence their opinions is to make sure that whatever little new information they read, is sanitized by algorithms which can avoid showing them stuff that can interfere with your own sales engine. This is much easier to do if there are already a lot of research papers which tout the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
Neither a drug, nor a vaccine
Here is another example of Pharma playing a really long game.
Suppose people all over the world actually realize the mRNA technology is too dangerous and reject the next vaccine which is based on it. What if I told you the alternative could actually be worse(!)?
You might remember that of all the “approved” COVID19 treatments, the only ones which were not completely useless were the monoclonal antibodies. In other words, people generally have a very positive opinion about them6.
So consider this push by Pharma to get monoclonal antibodies for RSV into the childhood immunization schedule, within that context.
Is this a drug or a vaccine? CDC is playing fast and loose with the definition of vaccine again, calling it a vaccine when convenient and a drug when that is more convenient. In order to get it onto the childhood vaccine schedule it becomes a vaccine—giving the manufacturer a waiver of liability. But it must be coded for reimbursement as a drug. It will be covered by the Affordable Care Act insurance program as a vaccine. But if there is an adverse event when it is used alone, the adverse event report will be filed in the drugs system (FAERS) belonging to FDA. If it is administered along with vaccines, the adverse event report will be sent to VAERS, belonging jointly to FDA and CDC.
In other words, Pharma companies are now asking for the liability shield of the childhood immunization program…
A question many parents ask is - if vaccines harm children and adults, can manufacturers be held accountable in a court of law? The answer is no. The reason is that in 1986 the US Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVI). This legislation ended the right of individuals injured by vaccines and parents of vaccine-injured children to sue vaccine makers. Instead, vaccine injury claims are heard in a special ‘vaccine court’ and damages are paid by the taxpayer rather than the vaccine manufacturer. In other words, vaccine makers are not legally or financially liable for harm and death caused by their products.
… while simultaneously requesting for a waiver of the accountability of VAERS.
Remember - Pharma companies got the liability shield only after promising to report vaccine injuries to VAERS.
VAERS is a national vaccine safety surveillance program created as an outgrowth of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (NCVIA) and is administered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). VAERS collects and analyzes data from reports of adverse events following vaccination.
What will happen to VAERS?
Unless CDC decides to stop publishing VAERS7 data publicly in the future, you can see why these Pharma companies might want to avoid sending reports into VAERS.
After all, all VAERS data is inside a simple CSV format, and anyone with basic knowledge of data science can infer a ton of insight from it.
And to make matters worse, it does not even need any gatekeeper to give lay people “permission” to access the data.
I guess a lot of people think this has already happened. But let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of the medical professionals, who are quite oblivious to what is going on.
I am probably more aware of US politics than the average person in India because I lived in the US for many years before moving back. But I am not so immersed in US politics that I can agree or disagree with Alex Berenson’s opinion.
As Steve Kirsch sometimes jokes, I cannot be stripped of my medical license because I don’t have one!
There is a joke going around on Twitter asking for new conspiracy theories given that all the old ones have already come true. So I decided to propose one so we don’t run out of conspiracy theories to discuss on Twitter :-)
Interestingly, I have seen some pro-Pharma accounts on Twitter claim that 13 billion mRNA vaccine doses were administered. Alex Berenson, in his recent podcast interview on Joe Rogan, said over 2 billion doses out of a total of 5 billion doses of the mRNA vaccines were actually thrown away, meaning the total vaccine doses is probably less than 3 billion. That is a giant difference!
Why does this difference matter? Vaccines which were sold to governments but were thrown away increases the denominator without adding new vaccine injury reports, making the vaccine look much safer for the purposes of “statistical calculations” by increasing the number of confounders. How convenient for Pharma!
In fact, I had never heard of the phrase “monoclonal antibodies” until COVID19. So it certainly gained a lot of awareness because of COVID.
In fact, there is already a precedent for this. Shockingly, no one in the medical establishment made a big fuss when the CDC stopped publishing VAERS writeups from the EU, even though the EU region has some of the most detailed and professional reports.
In case this happens, my prediction is that the CDC will claim that VAERS is now “too broken” to fix because of “too many” COVID19 vaccine reports :-) Since no good deed goes unpunished, I would not be surprised if they cite the work of all the VAERS analysts to “prove” their point!
The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines should be referred to as modRNA vaccines. NOT mRNA vaccines. The nucleosides are modified in the synthetic versions of RNA in the vaccines in order to increase their durability.