December 07, 2025

The Jab

1 hour 41 minutes

Image: Popularity of the first name Coral correlates with The number of biological technicians in Missouri

Spurious correlation #3,596

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/3596_popularity-of-the-first-name-coral_correlates-with_the-number-of-biological-technicians-in-missouri

Note: « every sequence has equal probability » is true but things are a little more complicated when you factor in entropy and the fact that some sequences are more « special » than others which matters when you consider say the probability of getting N heads and M tails after N+M tosses

Note: I did not create the section / chapter labels; I need to figure out some way to turn that off because I don't care for them; I'm also not responsible for the captions which Apple is auto-generating ( and ignoring any that I put in so I stopped bothering to try with those )

Transcript

Hey there I'm Scott and this is Tangents.

Well it is the 7th of December 2025 as I

record this.

Not quite sure when my last one was but it's been a while.

I'm I'm

in Phoenix and just the last day when I have a little bit of opportunity to

record something.

Usually I'm back at my mom and sister's place at least

recently and I've talked about this before but very happy that I have a place to

stay all those kind of stuff but I will say very difficult to do stuff like this.

I don't have a lot of time and space and all that kind of stuff.

It's interesting to

see what the things that I really miss are and like the the big ones from

having my own place.

Obviously you know controlling the temperature, controlling

little basic things like that.

Not having yeah not having somebody always there

kind of nice.

It is nice to be able to spend time with my mom and those.

But the

big ones that I miss the most more than anything like that are just having a

place to work.

Like I don't have I don't really have a comfortable chair there

which I there are a bunch of chairs.

There is that one that I can sit in that doesn't

hurt me.

I don't have a place to stand.

I don't have my standing desk.

I miss

that really badly.

And then I don't have my whiteboard and having like a

little space, little desk.

Nice cheer that I can sit in if I want to and

push away and stand if I don't and then having that whiteboard where I can just

offload short-term memories onto the board.

It's it's all really nice and I have

really miss it.

But anyway I have this opportunity I'm going to record a couple

today or at least that's my plan.

It's already 1842.

I've been working on some

stuff and I'm really getting close to releasing something but I have a couple

things that are just just frustratedly.

It's one of these things.

It always feels

like you're 90% of the way there and then you keep chipping away at a chip

away chip away chip away at a week later it's like you're 85% of the way

there.

That's that's kind of where I am.

I think I'm going to make it

converge soon-ish but it's it's been frustrating.

Anyway anyway the thing I

wanted to talk about today is something that it's something I talk about a

decent amount.

I've spoken a couple of times on it.

I don't think I've made a

specific episode at least in this iteration on this but this is particularly

anti-vaxxers and I'm calling this one the jab and the reason I'm calling it

the jab is I don't know what happened with language why people use this term

when they're anti-vaxxers but for some reason they do and you know if you're

from the UK okay jab that's what you call it.

Any US calling an injection calling

a vaccination a jab it's weird it's just weird and this is coming from

somebody who like this room is you know the climate control I've set to

the Celsius set to grid.

I do that.

I set the speed and a car to kilometers per

hour.

I do 24 hour time and things like that.

I'm not saying that you can't do

things that are not typical but why are you doing it? And the fact that this

is so correlated I need I've talked about this before.

I need to make one of

these on literacy and when I say literacy it's not just the ability to

directly like read and write that's a factor of literacy and end of numeracy

as well you know understanding basic things in math and things like this but to

be really literate doesn't just include being able to directly read the words

on a piece of paper it involves being able to critically analyze them being

able to understand what's behind them and there's a lot more to that than just

literally directly reading word by word what's there.

One of the things that I

think I've talked about this many times as well but I have been online for so

long and especially like in forums and things like that there are a lot of

things that are extremely extremely obvious to me that you see somebody's

somebody says something I just immediately glaringly and I'm not saying that I

have some special power ability here it's not you know it's very

developable and a lot of people have this too but I've spent enough time

that I really can recognize tone in text you can see a lot of the authorship like

whoever says something you could feel it you really can and it's something like

I had a good in an argument with somebody I don't know a week or two ago and

it was a white woman it's relevant here but I shared something that was about

the sort of Malcolm and you know the whole idea of the sort of white

liberal being a bigger impediment than air quotes conservatives to progress

and I shared that and I'm explaining some stuff and then you get the almost as

though you needed an example white woman comes in and talks about how you know

well I think this is also power imbalance and yeah like there are a lot of

factors in public a you don't need to be centering yourself like this was not

this was not a space for you to come in and do that but also this whole idea and I

am not an expert in this domain but I know enough to know just simply saying oh you

know these other factors there are these other explanations or it's this thing that

affects us all and you're trying to pull race out of the equation it doesn't it's

actively harmful it really is and the thing about this is like what she said was just

such an archetype of a pattern that you know it's like you're glaring with sunburn

right I look at you and you're just glowing and condessantly it's obvious right and she

is insisting like oh you don't know me you don't you know how can you jump to and I was I

will say I was being extremely I would say diplomatic and trying to be helpful and I kind of

I said you know like maybe go check out Rebecca the the white woman whisperer

who I recommend to anyone I think she's got a lot of good stuff especially if you're

your skin color looks like mine in your you don't say you totally don't think that your

racist at all I kind of stuff you're probably doing a lot of harm that you don't realize and

there are places you can go so I'm just saying go there you know maybe look maybe think about it

but anyway she was extremely not having that and got really upset and weirdly you know

unfriended me this was unfaithful unfriended me and then I said something we we we did some back

but she says something I said something about you know how it's odd the you know this obviously

offended you enough the you unfriended me and then she said she didn't unfriended me and then we went

back and forth and then a couple of steps later she's like well I unfriended you because and

why don't you just fucking tell the truth why don't you just accurately I don't understand

this thing that people feel compelled to especially when something is just obvious why why are

you lying about it like it's just weird but yeah and then she was explaining oh we met and we talked

so many years ago when you were running for office and you seemed really intelligent and a lot

of complimentary stuff and then she's like oh but I must have misjudged you and no you didn't misjudge

you didn't I mean I'm not trying to suck my own dick here but you know I have a certain amount of

insight and a certain amount of intelligence and awareness on in this domain and you know the

the fact that you don't like what I'm saying doesn't necessarily invalidate what I'm saying but

anyway I don't want to talk about that that's not the the point of this episode what I want to

talk about here is anti-vaxxers and I'm not even gonna talk specifically about yeah because this is

a subject that you could go you could write full dissertations on you could do your long research

projects or multi-year research projects and it still wouldn't be complete but I want to talk about

some things that I think are relevant there and the end up being a problem in other areas and these

are these are things not not coincidentally this also has something to do with politics and with

people's inability to just recognize and accept basic I would argue obvious things and instead they're

trying to come up with just ridiculous epicycles on epicycles non-persononious answers for things

because they won't accept what is obviously the case but anyway coming in focusing on this

I got a message and it may have very well been sock puppet or I don't think it was a pot but

you know it was not somebody actually using their own government name it was not somebody

who's you know like representing themselves directly so somebody using a fake account or an account

with you know just some random pseudonym or whatever and they come in they pop up and I should have

it pulled up so that I could give you the full context doesn't matter too much but I said something

and then they said something about how you know I should look it up just to remember exactly

okay I should have actually obviously just done this yeah at the beginning but I I posted something

or ski did I should say waiting for the doctor there's an antivax or that this was

Monday last week on time flies it's almost a week ago today is Sunday I was at the

I doctor getting a retinal file or follow up and while I was waiting which took a very long time

I'm waiting and the doctors in the next room and I'm sitting there

listening overhearing and there's a woman in the other room not that that's relevant but yeah

or or someone with a femme voice I should say I don't know if it was a woman but

in the next room somebody is sitting there and they're blaming vision loss and then they're

talking about it in the way that it's like oh that thing that we're not supposed to talk about

the yeah and she's obviously talking about the the COVID vaccines and it's just like this

thing that was pissing me off so much because she's explaining I like I don't you can't read necessarily

what somebody's intentions are but the doctor was letting her roll with a lot of stuff that was just

out there and I I don't know maybe he's an antivax or or you know you just didn't want to accept

the yeah and I don't think that to be clear I don't know what her situation was I have no idea

but it sounded like it was some kind of idiopathic vision loss and you know so like no real

explanation there's obviously some underlying something that caused it but it didn't sound like

something that was like you did this and then that happened and I don't think it was his fault but

he's sitting there and I think letting her roll with this idea which is actively harmful for

everybody because it's you know fostering and fomenting antivax notions but he's letting her think

and be convinced and then go off and tell her friends all the doctor kind of agreed with me

that you know like maybe getting this vaccination was part of what precipitated her vision loss

and I will say you know first of all and this whole discussion I'm going to be

I'm going to try to be as deliberate and nuanced about it as possible it's it's a very complicated

subject and it touches on you know medical ethics bodily autonomy capitalism statistics

a bunch of different domains and I definitely absolutely I'm not going to be covering

everything exhaustively and you know like I'm going to touch on a few things and there's no way I

can I can do it full justice but I'm going to try to do as decent of a job as I can

and so first of all it is true absolutely nothing that we do is free of risk

there's nothing that we can do there's no choice we can make including the choice not to make a choice

you know not choosing is also a choice everything has a risk associated with it and that risk

may be you know like a one in a quadrillion chance of you know you stand up in the morning

and something happens in a localea like anything you do there could be an extremely extremely

rare unlikely event or series of events that causes that to end in all kinds of different ways

and that that's important to acknowledge I think you don't want to say something is risk free

because nothing is risk free absolutely nothing and then this is of course true because it's

true for everything is true for any kind of medical intervention or treatment vaccination procedure

whatever people people die from you know drinking water like literally drink water aspirated

and you could die there are more you know is that the most rare most ridiculous kind of thing

in the world you can die from just sun exposure you can die from pretty much anything that you do

on a daily basis you cross the street you can very easily die you can you could just be sitting

in bed and immediately right could just fall from the heavens and kill you there's there's nothing

again that you can do that is not got some risk attached to it and those risks could be mortal

risks for everything again and so it's certainly possible absolutely possible that somebody

gets a vaccine and then that causes some kind of adverse reactions and and I will even go so far

as to say we know there are certain things that will happen for sure add to some you know it's

some rate low rate but you know you can be assured that there are certain risks one of those risks

that is very well known and understood is that for people who have immune issues immunological

issues such as autoimmunity the things like the hedge events in a vaccine can cause some kind of a

flare-up or reaction so those are things that can happen and this is also just a little editorial aside

this is one of the reasons why it's so important that as many people who can be effectively vaccinated

get vaccinated because there are people who genuinely have reasons like actual medical reasons

where either they can't get vaccinated because it could cause a flare-up in their autoimmune

disease or they're on some kind of immune suppressant therapy or they just have some other

immune suppressive state or immune suppressate and so they can't be effectively vaccinated

the only way that they can be protected is if the rest of us are vaccinated and if enough of

us are vaccinated and enough of us take precautions and do these kinds of things now you have this

thing where all of those chains of infection get broken and you know things stop propagating

and this is herd immunity is basic but I'm trying to describe without actually calling it that but

annoyingly people have sort of stolen this term and twisted it into something else but what herd

immunity is is basically even if you're not effectively vaccinated or immune to something if enough

people around you are immune to it then you could get infected and then you can't give it to somebody

else or if somebody else gets infected they're not surrounded by enough people who are susceptible

and it sort of fizzles out and so that can protect other people you know you're not able

to give it to somebody and so they're not able to give it to somebody else and then that other

person which it can be you is protected by everybody else being protected this is one of the reasons

why even not great vaccines where they're only giving like 60 70% protection if you get enough

people vaccinated in the population you can actually use those to eradicate diseases because what

really happens ultimately is based on the number of people who are vaccinated have current they

are completely the vaccinations and in fact if they are all kind of stuff based on all of those

kinds of things you are adjusting the basic multiplication factor so you're adjusting like

I'm using things a little bit sloppy here because this is this is a very deep

I put it being a logical in a area that for the lay person when you get sick there's some number

which is like how many people you are likely to infect and if that number is above one then that

means that each person that gets sick gets more on average than the replacement number of people

to get sick and that means that you get amplification and that means that you get exponential growth

if you in fact you get sick you infect two or three people now you have an exponential

thing where every time you get sick you infect two or three people every one of them infects two

or three people and so on and so forth and very quickly you get massive massive growth if you

understand anything about exponential growth you know it doesn't take that many steps to get the

huge numbers so that is this this replication factor and as you're getting more and more of the

population vaccinated you're lowering that as you're doing other interventions you're lowering that

and at a certain point if you do enough interventions you've got it below one and as long as

that you know like each infected person is infecting on average less than one person and it's

something that you can actually combat less from so if it's something like HIV where you get it and

you're not going to recover or in enough time yeah you're not going to get rid of it you can

to have this this work but for something where you actually get sick and then recover and then

ideally you have convalesced and you're no longer sick no longer infectious now if it's below one

that means you're not replacing yourself which means that you get exponential decay

and if you get exponential decay then things will very quickly fizzle out it's the same kind of

property of exponential growth into decay so basically the the thrust of all of that is you

adjust that number we do interventions which generally are public health interventions and enough

of those give you the ability to eradicate or at least greatly reduced diseases and even you know

even if you're still above one and you have exponential growth there are good reasons to dial

that down like for example if something is going to use a lot of medical resources the care for people

if you dial that down even if it's still a problem it's under a more controlled kind of

regulated growth to be useful but you especially would like to have things actually be below one

anyway rambling on that's not what I want to talk about here but it is a thing that I think people

have to understand that just because vaccines are not perfect doesn't mean that they're not extremely

useful and I think also like I'm going to get back on track in a second though one thing I

really constantly have to say and I blame Biden for a lot of this because you know you had this

idea at a certain point well it's it's a very complicated thing in general but it's very simple to

understand a certain aspect of this which is Swiss cheese this is to say if you have any kind of

intervention any kind of layer of protection and it's not perfect it has holes if you have one of those

then you have holes and things can get through if you have two of them and you stack them some of

those holes are not going to overlap which means even though you have two imperfect layers of protection

you get better protection then you might expect because some of those holes are not overlapping

that's that perfect again but you get you know it's improving and you can do three or four

multiple layers of Swiss cheese and you get fewer and fewer of these passageways that things can

get through and this is also you know in other domains they call it defense and depth or you know this

Swiss cheese model is extremely extremely simple extremely well understood and I think you can

explain it to a little kid so that is how vaccines and masks and all these other things work you

have a vaccine that's not perfect but it does a good job that's one layer of Swiss cheese

you wear a respirator that's another layer of Swiss cheese you avoid situations where you're going to be

in you know places that are like closed and you're going to have like a lot of people with them

that's another layer of Swiss cheese you improve ventilation you improve their filtration

you add in other public health interventions or or say rapid early detection and then when

somebody's you know you detect somebody's infected add-in contact tracing add-in the ability to

quarantine people yeah do a quarantine for a little while and tell people come for us

and you add all this kind of stuff and then you get your contact traces you get quarantine

if you've been exposed to somebody and then you get tested after whatever the incubation period is

and you're negative now you're free to go if not you get to be quarantined yourself until you recover

you know you do these kinds of things and each one of these layers of Swiss cheese adds more

and more protection you don't need that many layers of imperfect protection to get pretty good

protection also so the problem is of course Biden just like Trump is an extremely lazy

student doesn't understand stuff doesn't really care the sort of philosophically is a big cheater

I would say the kind of person I mean obviously know he literally cheated on stuff and

undergrad in law school and then it was a big plagiarist got drummed out of the 1998

presidential pride primary for plagiarism yeah he's not a great guy but because of that sort of

underlying ethos and way of looking at things he saw this problem like you have this pandemic

and wanted to address it in the sense that he wanted to get credit for it didn't want to actually

talk to people who know what the fuck they're doing and figure out how to actually address it

which incidentally would not have taken that long like if you if you had a test trace isolate

program and especially you know you did like a six to eight week

paid sort of pause you know you can make it voluntary you don't have to like lock people down so to

you know you have a pause preferably you stay home preferably you don't do this but you don't even

have to make it perfect you do that and then you add to that ideally vaccinate people

improve and improve filtration improve ventilation all of these kinds of things very quickly

you could reduce this stuff to essentially just a trickle it would be very difficult to fully eradicate it

because there are reservoirs and nonhumans like other animals but you you could get it down

to very low levels and when it does crop up you could detect it very easily isolate and then

prevent it from spreading those are things that you could very easily do which is frustrating because

yeah if you if you've taken epidemiology like this is not some

ridiculous complex unsolved problem we understand how to deal with this stuff and you could

within again six to eight weeks basically be done with it you know you'd still have again

these outbreaks and you'd still have surveillance but you'd basically be done and instead of doing that

um he took kind of the shortcut which was okay well we're not gonna actually do this and instead

we're going to say you get vaccinated and now you're magically protected and the vaccine is a magical

personal shield that's completely effective and blah blah blah blah the problem is vaccines are not

magical personal shields they are a component in a comprehensive public health plan and again

at best at best they will protect you from getting infected like eighty ninety percent of the time

is a really good vaccine there are some that are better than that but you know but it's not like

a magical personal shield again it works mostly from herd immunity it does protect you it made

you know it's it's always good to be vaccinated now well I guess unless you're talking about

uh I something like say dengue fever where if you if you're infected one time it's not that bad it's

not great but it's not that bad but then you get infected again and uh it's a much worse

much worse disease uh dengue fever if you get vaccinated against it and then you get infected

is actually not a thing that you want to do.

The only time that it makes sense to the really get

vaccinated is if you've been infected once now you've already got some immunity and then you

get vaccinated and that protects you a little bit from subsequent infection but for most other

diseases that's not the case most diseases getting vaccinated will make the course better

don't get the outcomes better and again all of these things are statistical on average just

so on and so forth so again I would like I I am somebody who looks at vaccines is kind of

modern miracles and there are things that if you can get them very generally as long as they are

protective I think it's ridiculous not to now and then they're I guess as long as I'm talking about

this our immune systems have very broadly two different ways of approaching things so we have

something called the Nate immunity and an adaptive immunity and innate immunity is stuff that just

works in general it's not necessarily specific to anything but it's sort of a shield and it could

be literally like in Tagument your skin it's a big part of the innate immune system just keeping

stuff out of your body we have a lot of mechanisms for detecting viral viral replication in ourselves

so a lot of viruses end up producing double stranded RNA and so we have things that detect

double stranded RNA which our bodies don't generally produce and then there's this whole series

of innate anti viral things and these kinds of things that that's not the only mechanism that

that's one these kinds of things give you kind of non-specific protection and then we have

adaptive immunity which is sort of a learned immune response and the way this works it's complicated

but the general gist of it is that your immune system has the ability to recognize things

called antigens and these antigens are they're usually proteins it doesn't matter what they are

but they're parts of infectious agents that have a specific shape to them you could think of it

it's a little more complicated than that basically now when you've seen that thing

first you have that innate immune response that's very non-specific this brings up

a whole slew of immune cells they get exposed and then the ones that happen through this process

it's actually evolution of real time in your body but basically you produce this huge set

of completely random abilities to recognize things and then some of those are going to just by

chance be better at recognizing any kind of antigen so you get exposed to that antigen the ones

that can recognize it get in there they get angry they multiply and then they you know fine

tune and they get better and better at recognizing it and now you have this population of memory cells

that will be kind of at some places in your body and then if you get exposed to that same

infectious agent again those memory cells get you know get recruited they get the tech you're

able to detect this again and then they're ready to respond so you have a much faster

immune response and much more specific immune response much more effective immune response

if you've been exposed and this is again Danny fever it's a little bit different there are

other things that are immune invasive that there are complications that get added to this but that's

the general way of work so vaccinations just expose your body to a specific antigen or a set of

antigen and now they've gone through this process of doing the adaptive immunity and now you're

no longer naïve you're able to muster a response that is specific to whatever that antigen is

very quickly that's the whole point of vaccination that's literally all it is

and it's it's one of these things it's it's not complicated again just like just like Swiss

cheese is not complicated you can explain these things to little kids and I see this as a massive

it's an educational feeling but it's a public health failing that we don't teach people these kinds

of things we don't teach people what mRNA is for example like mRNA messenger RNA is just single

stranded RNA ribospolyc acid doesn't matter what that is but it's basically a string

of bases a string of little pieces and each one of these things is like a letter and you've

without getting into the chemistry these will be AUG and C and the way it works is in your DNA

so in the nucleus of yourselves or your mitochondria and various places you have these double

stranded sequences of paired letters these will be ATG and C and the T and the U are sort of

swapped in the DNA and RNA but don't worry about that out but basically you have this long sequence

of letters and a sequence of complementary letters and then those find to each other and then you have

this double stranded letter that's your your genome and there are ways that that can replicate

itself you can imagine you unzip it you make a copy now you've got two copies you fill in the other

you make the complementary strand basically now you've got two copies but you can also

unzip it and turn DNA and RNA and when you do that you've expressed the mRNA for a gene

there's more stuff to it like you can do editing after this and like change things a little bit

basically comes out of your DNA and you've got mRNA and then that gets that's called the transcription

that gets translated into protein and again you don't need to know what protein is you don't

need to know it's like a sequence of amino acids and three letters of the mRNA code for each

single mall or single I'm trying to train that to get too much into the chemistry video

each three letter sequence codes for a specific amino acid just think of it as like a

building block at the protein and the particular string of amino acids that you make determines

the structure of the protein and then that in turn determines the function of the protein and things

can be structural proteins they could just be like collagen or last and they're adding like

stiffness or flexibility or rigidity that kind of stuff they can often be enzymes so they're like

specifically speeding up certain chemical reactions or lowering the activation energy for them

um a little more complicated in that but um yeah those are common things and so if you

you go DNA mRNA protein for most things that's how genes are expressed and so you know to

say keep saying mRNA and they're I haven't touched viruses or vaccines or anything like that

mRNA is just how your body makes protein it's how your body does basically you know the vast

fast majority of things that it does and viruses also make proteins and turns out some viruses

there are lots of different I'm I'm going to go off on a little tangent of a tangent I'm sorry

that's what I do viruses for their genomes can have single or double stranded DNA genomes or

RNA genomes there are some that are double stranded RNA there are some that are single stranded RNA

there are some that are plus-sense single stranded RNA and a plus-sense means the coding

RNA which means they're basically mRNA as their genome happens to include the COVID

coronavirus is there are ones that are minus-sense and these have to be first uh you have the

non-coding version replicated the coding and then that codes for proteins there are others

that don't go through proteins they're just uh yeah and then there are things where they're like

double stranded or single stranded DNA then you have to go through RNA or sometimes there are

even things like retro viruses where have there's the where the genome will be RNA and then it

has to go back into DNA gets encoded or incorporated into the host genome there are lots of

complications but in the case of coronavirus is the genome itself is essentially mRNA if you get

infected by a coronavirus you're replicating that viruses genome which means you're replicating

massive amounts of the mRNA that comprises the genome so it's kind of weird that people get

strange about this because it's just like if you understand what I just described

which which again is stuff that you know like is like biology 101 level stuff or molecular biology

no one but it's stuff that anyone could understand again and if we would teach people this kind of

stuff then all of this nonsense about mRNA being somehow like a big deal or you know like something

horrible or shocking or whatever which is go away like it wouldn't get traction because there's

nothing to have traction it's just simply you know like it's like obsessing about a bolt you know

like somehow a bolt is a bad thing there are bolts and everything yeah bolts are just kind of an

essential component of how things are put together and you know it's not like there's something

magical or evil about a bolt at similar way mRNA it's just mRNA and when I would when I

took a virology the first time and going to date myself here a little bit but it was in the 90s

it was I think about 20 years before mRNA vaccines became a practical reality and

the professor incidentally Dr.

Brooke Jacobs who I really like one of my best professors when I'm

probably my favorite professor ever when I took a class certainly up there annoyingly he was also

a good researcher and got yeah that did decent job with the funding so he was able to

escape teaching and then now yeah because he was so good at research they pulled out of that and they

let's somebody also it was not that very good at it teach the class but don't worry about that

it's just it's kind of annoying the way the academia really like looks at teaching is the secondary

thing this kind of annoyance nuisance that you're trying to like you have to do it but you don't

really want to and it's kind of punishment if you're not successful and the other stuff so

it's it did totally irrelevant but the thing is when we're when I was taking this class he was

explaining you know like one day maybe if we're really lucky and we really work hard we'll figure

out how to make an mRNA vaccine that was the goal and the reason that you want to do it is because

if you know most vaccines if you're using some kind of a organism to to vaccinate people

you either use a live attenuated organism which is to say it's a weaker version of the original

and sometimes those attenuations are not great but you know it's less bad or you take the original

one and you kill it and then you use a dead slash inactivated version and that is the way that

we've vaccinated people for the longest time you know like up for for the first vaccinations

for smallpox we're basically just taking post-struals drying them out grinding them up

and then like blowing that shit up somebody's nose and because of how it was

inoculated and on a bunch of other things people would end up getting a different kind of infection

and sometimes getting some protection out of it but you'd still also kill people with it you know

it's not a it's not great to get exposed to live virus especially when that is something that

kills you so then you try to either kill it deactivated and sometimes when you deactivate it

it doesn't all work like you'll get some leaks through or there's some process issue

there was with a lot of air with a killed polio vaccine this happened actually

it wasn't properly deactivated and then some people got polio from it that was you know

but again like one thing I want to say is every time I talk about something like this

that happened one time got detected got fixed and then it was not it was it was not like an ongoing

thing and also also this is true with all this kind of stuff once it happened got fixed

but even even with it happening at some low rate the protection that the vaccines gave

was far far better than the risk of getting an actual infection from getting vaccinated

it's one of these situations where you just end again I understand

were terrible at understanding relative risks were terrible at understanding like you know

some things like I said everything has risk associated with it but even if you have a vaccination

that could cause you know it's like bad it could even kill you at a low rate if the rate at

which that is killing you is less than the rate of getting killed by an actual infection

then it still makes sense to be vaccinated and by far even in that worst case scenario with

the polio virus where there is that one fuck up even then it actually was more protective

than harmful you know that the relative risk was in no veriner like complete no veriner

now so anyway that the thing that's cool about mRNA vaccines and the reason that we're working on them

for so long is that you don't need to have the whole organism you can just take the part of the

organism that is going to elicit protective immunity and you can just replicate that really quickly

and not only that you could say okay here's this new organism I've never seen before

and part of this is also you know 20 years ago it was a much bigger deal to get sequences

but now you can get sequences for almost nothing like it's 100 bucks easily yeah most things

probably like 50 bucks or significantly less it's not a big deal getting there are certain

things that cost a little bit of money like building a genetic library and you but to get a sequence

for an awful organism is not that hard today and not that expensive and once you have that

sequence you can actually depending on how novel it is but if it's like a coronavirus you know

because these are all related and you have a bunch of other examples of them you can kind of look

and you don't you're not going to see like exactly the same parts of the genome and everything

but you'll see sort of in the same sense that you have you know similar bones and you know

the digits you have phalangees you have parcels and metotarsals and femurs and

phobias and phobias and all of these kinds of things they're conserved so if you look at those

in an orangutan and you look at those in a human they might not be exactly the same but you

can kind of tell what they are you can look at the genomes of these viruses and kind of tell okay

this is the spike protein that's going to be involved in recognizing you know like binding to

the target cells and performing an infection this is going to be the DNA polymerase or RNA

dependent RNA polymerase or whatever you know you can kind of look at these things and understand

from the sequences what they do and this actually ends up being a really cool thing because if you

have developed a mRNA vaccine against any kind of organism that's even closely related you can

know what the targets are and this is how we were able to get such yeah for a novel vaccine

every novel virus get these vaccines so quickly because we already had coronavirus vaccines

that were mRNA based we already had targets once you have those targets you get the new sequence

you put that in and printing up mRNA is is that quite the same as putting a thing into a

printer and then printing it but it's so close now we have things that are literally called the

DNA printers and you can just make whatever the sequence says that you that you want to you can

make that and you can update it really quickly so you're able to go from something that we've never

seen before you get the sequence takes almost no time and then you can say okay well these are

the targets you can make the you can make several different vaccine candidates for different

targets and then you know just go into testing test for safety and efficacy all is kind of

stuff and you're there you're basically there and this is you know it's magical because you don't

have the full organism you don't have anything that could revert you don't have to develop

and attenuated version you don't have to spend a long time figuring out how to make an effective

vaccine against whatever whatever you're trying to make it vaccine against you just sort of take

the cookbook of this is how we make or at least a certain kind of immunity from mRNA to a protein

to an immune response and this will be an effective immune response for whatever this agent is

and so you can go from something that might be a many decades long process to something that you

could do realistically in six months to a year potentially significantly faster and you know just

it's hard to explain it's hard to convey just how amazing that is versus what we used to do

but it is a ridiculous improvement orders of magnitude better so anyway of course the the main thing

like I'm trying to explain enough there to get you to understand there's not like a reason to be

particularly nervous about these things and also it is a just scientific and medical miracle

that we were able to develop them as quickly as we were and similarly also all the

all of the standard vaccinations that we have all of these are against diseases which are

necessarily massively lethal but they definitely have a lot of morbidity and mortality associated

some of them killed like if you look at not that distant of past before the era of vaccines

and antibiotics most kids used to die like if you had a kid the odds were strongly

in favor of them dying like they would be the die of what is now a preventable disease

or you know often like you get an injury or something and oh you have an injury which leads

to an infection which kills you now take some antibiotics and you survive oh you have a

appendicitis that would have killed you and you can get a pretty easy medical procedure that saves you

and again all these things have risk associated with them but they you know if you look at the

relative risk it's massively better to to have these interventions than not so anyway the thing

that I really want to focus on here is just that humans are in a lethal at perceiving or understanding

relative risks are intuition against sort of what is dangerous and what is safe is terrible absolutely

terrible yeah and you always hear the example of air travel is the safest or flying is the safest

way to travel and driving is much more dangerous and yet people when they're driving and especially

when they're driving themselves they feel like they're at much lower risk and you know this is just

one example of what you think is the reality being completely opposite from the actual reality

and similarly you're getting and an occupation you're getting jabbed to use the word

with a sharp scary needle and not only that but it has you know who knows what kind of chemicals

are inside just probably die hydrogen and oxide in that needle that's getting injected into

you that's kind of scary right your perception of what that risk is associated with that is one thing

and then the reality of that risk is another and you have to consider like what is the actual

risk which is again very very low not zero nothing is zero risk as I said a couple of times here but

it's a very low risk of a few things versus a very real and much larger risk of getting an infection

and not being protected from it and you also have to factor in you know it's you're not here alone

like there's the chance of you getting that infection and not being protected but there's also

the chance of you getting an infection and transmitting that to other people and whether something

is going to kill you or not whether it's going to permanently injure you or not if you go out

and you're part of a chain of infection it might not kill you but is it going to kill one of

the people that you infect or is it going to kill one of the people that they infect and if you look

at the the case mortality rate for COVID because obviously that's one of their things I'm talking

about here it is in the low single digits of percentage and the basic replication factor again

depends on the variant and the bunch of other stuff but it could be as high as a 18 so you

get infected it's very contagious you're infecting a bunch of people but even if it's say you know

imagine it was something that's not that infectious and you're infecting like a handful of people

you infect five people let's just say this is an abstract virus or something like this is not

a specific one but you infect five people you get infected each one of those five people

infect five people so one hop out five people are infected two hops out 25 people are infected

and then 25 times five and then so on and so forth and very quickly you've gone from one to five

to 25 to 125 to 125 to 625 and it just keeps going and going and going if the case mortality rate

is one percent that is the same one percent of infections kill somebody then all you have to do is go

out three hops and now you are like even if you were fine even if the people you infect that are

fine now you've at least killed one person and if you wouldn't have infected people if you would have

broken the chain of transmission at yourself that person would still be alive you go out one more

step it's going to be five times that and so on and so forth so to me and I know this is controversial

but we live in a society and we have a responsibility to each other and so you have your own

personal protection and you also have to think about like what is the contribution

of you taking measures to keep from getting infected and keep from infecting people and it is

I mean I'm not going to say it's quite the same as like taking a gun and pointing it at a crowd

closing your eyes and shooting it but it's not that different you know if you are letting people

get infected then and they're going to let people get infected a couple of hops out somebody's dead

now if you point to a crowd and pull the trigger versus you sneeze one seems much more proximal

one is much easier to understand the causation but both of them you as surely lead to somebody's

and of course also because everybody who gets infected in fact more people it's not just one death

it's tens or hundreds or thousands of deaths a few hops out so you couldn't

I don't know to me it seems like a no-brainer especially when the the cost is extremely

enough or low and it has a benefit to you and you're also protecting other people so anyway

I guess I wanted to say we're also terrible just in general and it really fits in here as well

but we're terrible at understanding causal relationships with things it's not just that we're

bad at understanding relative risk but it's very difficult for us to actually know

a cause to be and there are a number of things that I think complicate this but fundamentally

a lot of it is sort of the way that our brains work and we have a tendency to kind of overlearn

and I would say it's sort of a tendency towards superstition so it's not to say that you're not

learning things that are actually happening but I think I'm speculating a little bit here and why this

is but I think probably for ancestors if you did something and then that almost killed you

you don't want to do it again or if you saw somebody died from something you don't want to do that

so it was probably better to see something and then notice something happens afterwards

and just avoid that behavior and think that that might be the the thing that caused it

probably more important than actually delving into what actually was the causal agent

or what was the the causal chain so you know if there are three things you see somebody

does somebody sneezes and then they die and somebody takes a walk over here and then they die

or somebody flips a coin and then they die it might be well I didn't use good examples

and then somebody runs toward a cliff and falls off the cliff you see those four things

three of those four things there's nothing you could do about that they're not they're not

actually causing somebody to die one of them they are but the problem is you want to have a learning

model that catches the one where you know it is actually going to kill you and it's probably

better to have false positives there like you learn things that are not really the case

than to not learn things and then be killed by them or you know something else that's going to

cause you know not necessarily your death but you know consequences that keep you from being

able to reproduce or keep you from being able to reproduce as effectively or whatever

so that is I think why we're bad at perceiving causation but ultimately the the consequence

of that is we're very very prone to superstition and especially you know when something happens

I mean this is true just in general if you notice patterns your brain will

associate you know this happened and then that happened and you can go

I always I was I was always liked this but there's a Tyler Viggin VHEN Tango Yankee Lima Echo

Romeo Victor India Gulf Echo November TylerViggin dot com go there and there's this thing called

spurious correlations and what this is is basically it's something called data

dredging or p hacking which is you're looking this is an interesting thing I think and it

gets to one of the reasons why like we don't we don't understand statistics as a general rule

like even if you've taken statistics epidemiology is full of things where they're very counterintuitive

or there's something that is very easy to misunderstand or draw the wrong conclusions from

I've taken epidemiology a few times and that was the biggest takeaway I had which was

it's just fraught there's I don't have a good example offhand but there are so many things that you

learn about where you'll see it and there's something that seems like obviously this is you know

obviously this is the conclusion you would draw obviously this is how stuff works and then you

actually look at the statistics and it's something that's much more complicated or it's misleading or

anything like this it's it's fraught I would just say so understanding that is one reason why I generally

don't I don't wait too much into epidemiology other than the things that I'm pretty confident about

and I'm much more of an expert at the topic than a lot of people who you know tended to say a lot

of stuff about it and then even if you don't condemn epidemiology statistics is fraught and and

again like you know you could be very strong in statistics and you're going to

fuck up a epidemiology similarly you could be pretty good into which they're at intuition

but you're gonna have terrible intuition about statistics there are lots of things

yeah and you can just go through they're not really paradoxes but things that are surprising

of often be called paradoxes that are things that are just very simple statistical things

that are very easy to prove or demonstrate and they're just really really counterintuitive

like the birthday paradox if you have more than not even that many people the odds are that you're

going to have two people that have the same birthday you don't know what the birthday is going to be

but you have 20 people in the room it's very very likely that two people have the same birthday

shockingly likely even though each birthday is going to be one day out of 365 days of the year

another one that's is the Matty Hall problem you have the three different doors

two of them have nothing and then one of them has you know some big prize

if you have somebody open the door at random and your choice is to take whatever is there

or to reject it the odds of you succeeding in the next round are much better if you reject it

that's very counterintuitive like it's very it's one of these things I don't want to get like

deep into it but you can go through and do a lot of research on these things and there are

shockingly many of them and there are just things that you know you will think they work a certain

way and they just don't or or someone will really like coin tosses if you have a perfect

fair coin and every time you toss it there's a 50 50 shot of it being heads or tails

you would expect it in and I don't mean like maybe you have enough intuition that you don't

expect that to go heads tails heads tails but you kind of kind of still do you kind of think oh

it's going to be like half the time heads it has the time tails which means it sort of alternates

or balances out the odds that you'll have any particular sequence are all equal which means that

getting a hundred heads in a row seems very unlikely but there's nothing magical or special

but you know keeps that from happening there's nothing like that's a perfectly reasonable sequence

that is just as likely as heads tails heads tails tails or any other you know low and drop

or any any other sequence that doesn't just look sort of random so to speak

there there are a lot of things like this that again are just not intuitive and if you go to this

site that I sort of mentioned before Tyler bigan.com and look at these various correlations

you can find that if you look at one measure of fitness which is fitness and the sense of

sort of how you're measuring I guess you could you'd call it a figure of merit but how you're

measuring like two things are connected and this is the correlation coefficient so basically

if two things are changing in a way that one goes up the other goes up one goes down the other

goes down and so on if you guess a pattern and then you see it and you see a strong correlation that

tells you one thing but if you pick a correlation and you have a large collection of patterns

it's very easy to just sift through and find things that will be spurious correlations

and those two things sound very similar but the difference is monumental this is one of the reasons

why you know like you can almost be guaranteed that if you have enough patterns you'll find

correlations of any level like if you if you have you in fact you can do some statistical analysis

and figure out how many things you have to find in order to get some level of correlation so if you

want like a 90% correlation you need this many samples you need 95% 99% correlation you just need

this many and so on and so forth and it's a large number but it's not that large and if you get enough

you can pick any level of correlation and find it you can also figure out any kind of p value

I don't want to do what that is but it's a figure of what the odds are that something happened

by chance and if you misapply this statistic then this is called p hacking if you misapply it by

judging through data and looking for something then you can get something that looks like it's very good

by that statistic but the problem is you're sort of circularly applying that statistic the

find the thing that fits the statistic you're not using the statistic as it was meant to be used

if that makes sense so this kind of stuff this is also actually why and I see this

one all the time but for like audible air quotes AI bullshit somebody also say oh this has a 90%

success rate or 90% accuracy or something like this what does that actually mean I mean if you're

the way that these things are trained and the way that the things are

are working here you're kind of misapplying a figure of merit in such a way that you're going to

find something that looks like it's much better than it is also 90% is not great but you can find

something that is going to fit 90% of the time especially especially if you're not

careful about how you put in the data and how you do the analysis and you're not

overfitting or overtraining or anything like this you can find something that works 90 or 95% of

the time but it's completely wrong and it's just that it happens to work in the data

corpus that you have that you're looking at similar what you can find something that doesn't look

great and it's actually pretty pretty good it's just there's a lot of noise or there's some other

but you have to I think the general thing that I would take away is your intuition is terrible at

epidemiology even if you're really good at statistics and your intuition at statistics is really

terrible guaranteed even if you're you've spent a lot of time studying these things and especially

if you never have and it's very easy to to mislead yourself to to come to bad conclusions with things

like this and especially like when something is a very simple explanation or answer especially

to something that is really horrible like somebody dies you want an explanation for that you don't

want to just oh they just like shit happens you want to go like what caused this or or your

kid gets injured gets leukemia gets whatever any kind of thing like this you really want an answer

and you know it's it's not only do you want an answer you want that answer to be something like

so and so did something and it was somebody's fault it's not oh this cosmic rage just happened

to land here and then this other one happened to land here and you know you had this weird

free oxygen radical that happened to do this thing and the combination of those things caused

this problem or you know you had just a random congenital heart defect and then something happened

and you had heart attack that a very young age you want there to be a LA this was caused by a

person who did something foolishly and I think I don't know if that's a cultural thing

or if it's just an in a human thing but it definitely is a common thing and so the problem is

you have a brain that is sitting there sitting there basically designed to be a superstition machine

did just designed to look for patterns whether or not they're real and you have some kind of

a correlation and though that correlation could be by chance it could be not by chance but you know

it could seem really good but especially you know you filter out all the thousands or millions of

things that something could be and you filter out all the things that have either complex

causations or multifactorial causations or yeah and you come up with something where

something happened that was easy to identify and then at some point in the future something all

happened and you want there to be a simple explanation a causal explanation and so you come up

with that and I think this is how you get to a lot of people with these sort of anti-vax beliefs because

kids get a lot of vaccines that's just how it works that's the normal thing and that's not

I'm not saying that that's you know like that's just how it should be frankly you have and

you could just say like let's take something that's less charged kids are going to be exposed to

the sun many many times you know you get exposed to the sun every day for your life probably just

about and so there's something like you're going to get exposed to this thing many many times

which means that if something else happens if something bad happens it's very easy to say

well you know every kid that died of a bike crash was exposed to sunlight like isn't that

interesting every single kid who has ever you know died from from bicycling was exposed to sunlight

and if you had somebody sitting there trying to give you a bullshit answer and pointing a finger

at you know it's like big sunlight is causing your kids to get these bike racks and you

should avoid have your kids avoid that sunlight because yeah you don't want your kids to die

it sounds ridiculous but that is where you are with these vaccinations because

you have this thing this treatment that a lot of kids most kids almost all kids are getting a lot of

and then something happens which a lot you know things like childhood leukemias or injuries

or you know different things happen a lot during childhood enduring development also you have

a lot of things where you might not have noticed something and independent of anything else

that was going to come but because your brain is looking for these patterns you see oh this happened

and then days or weeks or months or whatever later this happened they must be correlated they

must be not only correlated but causal the the thing caused this other thing and especially you

know you take that that's your kind of innate leaning and then you have somebody who's

whatever reason maybe they have a financial interest or maybe whatever but for whatever reason

they're pushing the narrative that a causes b now you get that and you're in that situation

and you get really convinced that a causes b and this is one of these things like I'm not

it's certainly possible obviously that a did cause b I'm not throwing that out I'm not

dismissing it out of hand but the odds are that it didn't and how do you know if a caused b well

it actually for an individual is very difficult to like the tease out causation they

there are certain things where you know if if somebody shoots you and then you get killed you could

probably probably connect those two things somebody takes a knife and chops off your finger

and then you don't have a finger it's pretty easy to come up with the causation there but when

it comes to something like getting vaccinated even the efficacy of a vaccine you are a single

data point you're not something that you can't take a million copies of you and take half of

them and randomly not apply the treatment and half of them and apply the treatment and then see what

happens you can't control you can't conduct a control experiment you're just one path through reality

and because of that it's actually fundamentally kind of impossible for things that are subtle

the detect and determine causation and an individual basis now what you can do is look at populations

and there are some very powerful statistical methods that are that are common in epidemiology

that will help you tease out causation from correlation and detect these kinds of things

and then there are also like the the gold standard would be sort of what I described you

just like create a controlled experiment and you have two different populations which are as

similar as we can make them half of them we apply a treatment half of them we don't and then you see

what is the difference in outcomes that that would be something that is not necessarily ethical

when it comes to medical or medical stuff but that's sort of the gold standard you can do it without

that too but it gets more big it's heavier it's more complicated and then I don't even want to get

into like we for for vaccinations we generally don't do that anymore because what we discovered

for most of these is that it's not ethical to do that kind of a controlled experiment because we

know going in for most of these things being vaccinated is actually going to be very protective

and if it's something that you know it's something that you don't want somebody to get in the

consequences of getting it really bad it's just not ethical not the treat them and we also know

that the risk is very low and we know the probability of efficacy probably decent and just from

past experience like this is not like we just decided it so there are reasons why we don't do that

but that is the gold standard and so you know like even in yourself like the the kind of example

that I would give here because it's something that I hear people jump to a lot but

somebody that say say even you got a vaccine you were vaccinated and then something happens

and because I'm kind of on topic here let's let's say you got a rash now did the vaccine

cause the rash that's a complicated question and it's going to be you know I would argue it's

actually almost impossible to know definitively now you can say like okay well it's focused around

wherever you were vaccinated well is that from an immune that like an allergic reaction or

is it an infection is it that there was some kind of chemical contamination and it's just an irritation

and this is another thing also like people do not have a great training in what an allergic reaction

looks like this is this is one of these things I wish you know we should teach people early and

often obviously like CPR or basic first aid stop the bleed kind of stuff but you should definitely

also teach people to know the difference between say food poisoning and infection

you know food poisoning rapid onset you eat and then 30 minutes 60 90 minutes later

you're vomiting you have diarrhea it's very fast versus an infection usually more than 24 hours

often 48 72 hours kind of incubation period and then it's growing and then you get sick

after you've been exposed.

Understanding the difference and those kinds of things

understanding the difference in course understanding the you know like influenza

generally speaking is like a two week hellish kind of course you get exposed 48 72 hours later

you present with symptoms and then for like 14 days you'll feel like complete shit you'll have a high

fever and you'll have like phone and muscle aches and you have a bunch of stuff

and it's fairly characteristics stuff although flu like symptoms are going to be common for

pretty much any viral in fact most infections just in general because innate immunity is the cause of

a lot of these things and adaptive immunity is also but you know like understanding that kind of stuff

understanding that you know like if you get a cold or what you would call a cold not the same as the flu

and if you haven't had a definitive test for influenza you probably didn't have the flu and if you

had the flu you probably would know because again hellish two weeks and then also like we don't do

we don't do training for like how to deal with an abrasion or or the thing that I'm trying to get

to hear what is an immune what is an allergic reaction look like you know there are certain

things that are very characteristic of allergic reactions and you'll see people say like oh I'm

allergic to this food I think because they don't want to say they don't like it or something like

that or they don't want to try it whatever it is but you know an actual allergic reaction is like

information swelling redness, itching sneezing, you know there are certain signs and

symptoms that just come directly from that and then there are other things that are not

you know, probably not an allergic reaction and you see people all the time talking about oh I've got

allergies and it's something that is not in the category of things that

allergies cause and then for me like the question is do I want to they want to have a conflict

they want to argue with this person probably not but I also don't want to leave them not knowing

or with a misunderstanding it's just it's just the mess I don't like it but the point of all that

even in the case of you got to and you got some kind of intervention and then something happened

within yourself determining the causation is very difficult and determining like what it is

specifically that caused something even more difficult and also you have the situation that

you know if you you know so you get vaccinated and then a week later you get hit by a car

probably didn't have anything to do with you know you could have gotten hit by a car anytime

could have been the previous week but because it followed the vaccination now you've got this thing in

your head that is oh that must have caused it somehow this is again it's very superstitious magical

thinking kind of thing but it's it's an annoying thing that people will do and particularly when you

got people telling you all the bad things that come from vaccines so I think yeah that I could just keep

rambling on about this but the thing that I want to get to here the last thing on this one and

the biggest frustration for me on this topic is there's this thing called various which is the

vaccine what is it diverse reaction they should actually know that okay sorry it is the vaccine

adverse event reporting system which is the thing and it's not the only one we have a bunch of

these in different countries and basically the idea is it's this database that if you have been

vaccinated or you could just been vaccinated or somebody you know your patient has been vaccinated

and then literally anything happens afterwards you can put that in this database and this database

to be clear is not saying that a caused b it's not saying that everything that's in the database

that happened after somebody was vaccinated was caused by the vaccine but what this is is this big

wide dense net that's designed so that if there is anything that happens if there is anything that

the vaccine near any vaccine is causing it will get caught in this net and so the idea is basically

this is how it's supposed to work and how it does pretty much work until people kind of short

circuit of this and fucked things up but basically what it does is if there is any kind of an

actual causal thing it gets caught in there and then somebody can take that data and take other

data and use those epidemiological techniques that I was describing before if it detect first of all

if there is a real correlation so is it this doesn't mean that there's causation but you know like

you get people who have been vaccinated also have this thing with some higher than the baseline

popular probability so this is the thing you also if the consider is like in the population

everything happens at a certain rate and so if you get some kind of intervention does that go up

now just because the population that has had a lot of vaccinations has a lot of something else

does not mean that the vaccinations cause that thing you might say that the population with a lot of

vaccinations tends to have a higher terminal degree so more undergraduate degrees more graduate with

degrees than the general population it's not the vaccines necessarily cause that it's the you know

these things are you know correlated through other processes and one thing that leads to getting

vaccinated is also correlated with getting a higher education for example it doesn't mean that

a causes b it doesn't mean also like because there are people that would try to point this out

they're like oh that means it's people that are more educated you know it's not that either

it's other things cause both of them although I would argue you know but I don't want to get into

that right now I would say it is it's pretty pretty non-brand or pretty no-brand or kind of thing

but anyway the the reason that we have this various thing the reason that it exists in the first place

and the reason that we know vaccines are so fucking safe is that the whole

point of the system is that anything that does you know anything that does happen gets caught in there

gets detected and then anyone in the world who wants to and look at that data they can publish

something on it and then you know in a peer reviewed journal or even in bio archive now

and other people can look at that and they can say like oh well this data is good and this is

actually real which is kind of how science is supposed to work or they can say you know like oh

no this is actually not real because of this this is this is this confounding variable it was

this other thing and if it's real and it's there people will know people will see and you can't

really deny it it is because of the existence of this various database that we know how safe

vaccines are and the answers they're very very safe and it is frustrating incredibly frustrating

to me personally and I'm sure to do many other people that antifacts are go to this fucking

database which again so it is the reason that we know how safe vaccines are and they find the

stuff that's just random shit caught in the net and they decide that that actually is

causally linked not just that it's correlated which we don't even know just from it being in the

database you just know B followed A like you just know these two things happened it doesn't say

even that they're correlated it could just be be still followed A or be what have happened

completely independent could even be that B happens less frequently after you're vaccinated

but you're catching those events that happened after being vaccinated and because you're

catching them all you have this thing that sort of highlights what is this stuff that's worth

looking at people can look at those things and then if there is some kind of real risk and there

are risks again it's not everything has risk but the things that are real risks get detected

and usually there are things that are extremely infrequent and you need something like this because

you would need to like in order to detect the signal you need to vaccinate like trillions of

people which you're not going to be able to do otherwise the noise would be would be too great they're

you know and I'm using that kind of partly is an exaggerated example but also like a lot of these

actual adverse consequences are very very low rate kind of things and it's only because we have

such a sensitive that makes that we can even know that they exist and when you do see stuff like that

little things end up being enough to sort of stop stuff or to change stuff and once again

it's frustrating on so many levels that people look at this stuff that is the reason that we know

how safe these things are and the fact that they're very safe and they decide that they're dangerous

and they decide that there's some kind of a causal thing that just doesn't exist and it it's

physically painful it's physically frustrating and I wish that people down I don't think I assume that

nobody's going to listen to me rambling about this stuff and then change their minds but I would really

like somebody to I don't know change other people's minds or explain things to people better than I

have or just to you know like understand these things either not that complicated be there

things that you could actually understand and to see you know it's not a judgment against people

that you know if your kid gets sick or they're something wrong with your kid or there's something

that's perceived to be wrong with your kid and you're trying to like desperately find an explanation

for it and then you have some hooks to telling you that that explanation is this that doesn't

that that's not a judgment against you more a judgment against them but it's also like one of

these things where it's just like it's physically painful that people are lying to you and they're

causing harm and they're killing people to bring back diseases which are actually really bad

and kill a lot of kids cause a lot of you know not just deaths because deaths are bad but you know

like there are a lot of long-term consequences there are things like congenital issues that happen

when you're infected with certain things in in utero and you know because we've got good

vaccinations we have these you're avoiding a lot of these things so somewhere we I mean you know like

you could just look at like prenatal nutrition there are a lot of birth defects that are very

easily preventable with very simple you know like just having having enough b vitamins for example

or you know like just certain simple things and taking these things away that we've learned

that getting rid of the public health measures like vaccinations similar we also like so many

people now being trained to be averse to the masking like you see people who are sick and they're not

not looking like they're obviously sick they're obviously having a respiratory infection

is probably communicable and they're going out into the public and not taking any kind of measure

to prevent it and it's just like yeah I don't know it's it's I don't have the language to convey

how frustrating and annoying this is to me just it's like such a simple basic fucking thing

and we can't do it and doesn't need to be this way I want to get I would like to get better than

than we were but I definitely want to be to the point where you know like you're not getting people

to have cervical cancer who could easily have it prevented with HPV vaccine you're not getting

people to have you know hepatitis by something that could be easily preventable by a vaccine

you're not getting people to you know have pneumonia or you know have post viral symptoms

by things that you could easily prevent with vaccines and with masking and with just like

being a decent fucking human being and if you have employees letting them

in fact I wouldn't say insisting that they don't come into work when they're sick

and if you have you pay them pay them please but don't come into work thank you very much

talk about this a lot but there's a Bureau of Labor Statistics study from I didn't know what year

it was 1618 something like that it showed that within the US alone having unlimited paid

sick time would actually save billions and billions of dollars and it's one of these things like

it's almost like our policies and a lot of our things in this country are just designed

to make things worse like they're not really helpful we're not good and it's just it's irritating

but anyway hopefully hopefully this wasn't completely a waste of time and hopefully also

worth listening to I'm a little it will say little distracted because the walls in this

place are paper thin and like I can hear people fucking so I'm guessing people can hear me and

sitting here and it makes me extra self-conscious but I still wanted to get this while I had

some chance to record something I have another one I think I'm not gonna do today but hopefully

we do soon and hopefully I'll be in a better place where I'm not so worried about it but

thanks for listening as ever please vaccinate your kids and vaccinate yourself and

please also just don't listen to these fucking just assholes that are scaring you and telling you

lies it's irritating understand also you know and this is like the thing that I am

I I fucking hate the fact that pharmaceutical companies are for profit they take

the thing that's problematic about them pharmaceutical companies the companies that make vaccines

all of these it sucks that they're for profit it sucks that they are making money on these things

and that's just making money but making ridiculous amounts of money but people get kind of twisted and

bent up out of this one and the thing that sucks about it is that we have spent billions and billions

of dollars on any drug and you've actually anything like that billions upon billions of dollars

of public money has gone into developing this thing whether it's the treatment against hepatitis C

which is not very expensive to make and which could have you know essentially eradicated

have to see if you made it very cheap and got people to the take it but instead it became like a

massive cash cow for rich people at like an obscene amount per dose that's the problem it's not

they're pushing things through that are not safe although they're certainly like pushing for

drugs that are not safe and things like this or that are less safe than they should be but for

these vaccines you have theirs you have things like that if they were unsafe we would detect them

the thing that sucks about the mRNA vaccines is not that it's an unsafe thing it's that these are

things that are very safe very effective and frankly very easy to make and if we had the

infrastructure set up to make these you could you know some new emerging bacteria infectious disease

comes up and you could build new vaccines against it in a seemingly little time like ridiculously

overnight almost and the fact that we don't have that infrastructure the fact that that's not set up

the fact that people who have patents who again got those patents based on stuff that was developed

by US and other taxpayer dollars and they're getting to make a scene amounts of money for

stuff that is damn near free to make and saves lives that is the real obscenity that is the

problem with the for profit part not that they're pushing things through that are not safe

in fact part of you know they they don't have an interest really pushing things through

that are not safe because it's bad for business if you actually have stuff that's which is one

of the reasons why whenever you know you'll often see things that are pulled but are sometimes

good drugs but they have a certain risk and they decide that that risk is too much and you know

that the real problem again we paid for this shit just just like insulin we paid for that

shit the people who did the initial patents on it took like a dollar because they wanted it to be

open and free for everybody and we've spent so much time and effort making transgenic organisms

that can express the that they can basically make insulin that is either indistinguishable

from human or better in some ways and we can do it now using the same kinds of processes you

use to prepare and it is extremely cheap and extremely efficient to do and costs almost nothing

produce to make that is to say they could be making a profit and the monthly expense that somebody

with diabetes would would be paying is like dollars like single digit dollars and instead they've

turned this into essentially a lifelong racket where you're just going to be stuck for the rest of

your life paying a toll just to be alive that's the thing that sucks it should be anything like

this like it it's fine to sort of zero out it's fine to cover the costs and the expenses

it's even fine I think and I know people that would disagree with this I don't know that it's

necessarily bad to make some profit on stuff to some extent although yeah but you don't have to make

all the fucking money you don't have to extort people who are going to die without stuff and you don't

have to end like going back to these vaccines because these companies had these patents they didn't

want to release the patents and a lot of places especially under developed countries weren't able

to get people vaccinated and people just died and not only did people die you have a huge

reservoir of people where they're just passing infections back and forth which is an opportunity for

stuff to evolve and then eventually it comes you know because the world is not a bunch of little

bubbles that's interconnected eventually it comes back to wherever you are and now the vaccines don't

work as well and yeah you're just things are just much worse than they have to be not because

people with money are trying to get things through their unsafe but because people with money are

keeping people from being able to have these treatments and vaccines and all of these other

things because they're a way to make money and that is the real problem and it is so annoying that

people have twisted it into the exact opposite it's just so anyway this time I think I am actually

done this felt it's because I'm very self-conscious about like the paper thin walls I feel like

I'm probably talking weird I'm feeling like I'm not like fully into this I'm also tired as I

always am recently but I hope it was okay I hope it was interesting I hope there was something in there that was

was useful go go again for that Tyler Vengen type of Viggen rather dot com

spurious conclusions about spurious can't even speak spurious correlations go to the TylerViggen dot

com spurious correlations section find it on this homepage and there it

either a lot of interesting funny things in there because it's just random you know almost deliberately

obviously there's no reason that this is causing this and then and I hate audible airports AI

especially LLMs and bullshit factories that are based on plagiarism and ecological catastrophes

but one thing that I actually kind of like here is they show they kill have stuff make up

an explanation for why this correlation exists and it's it's laughable and it's all fiction

and hopefully it's obvious and then I think it kind of showing it shines the light on

both what's bad about these LLMs that they'll just make shut up and it also shines the light on

how you can make up an explanation for basically anything if you really want to

and it's one of the few uses for that kind of stuff that I would I would say is not terrible

I it's still rather not see it because it's it's it's very wasteful and it's

probably encouraging people to use the same kind of stuff but of the places that I've seen it used

one of the few places where I don't find it anyway go there look at this stuff it's kind of

entertaining I do it every like six months or so then something comes up and then I'll go through a

bunch of them and it's it's just funny because like because they're correlations

and some of them were pretty good you'll see these two patterns two time series and they'll be

like you'll look at it you know okay you could easily convince yourself that there's something there

and you can also look at what they are and you can just know probably not that necessarily

you don't necessarily know anything upreory but probably probably not with that

thanks as ever for listening and so yeah

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By Scott Menor, PhD