The whole video is painful to watch, it gets more bearable after the 2:11 mark when Kirsch (the blue shirt guy) slows a bit down.
The following is a recap of what I’ve understood them saying and some unpacking. I’m not educated in anything medical and still have a bunch of open question. If you spot any error or know the answer to these questions please let me know.
TL;DW
They seem to be making 3 main points:
Ivermectin prevents and treats SARS-CoV-2. It’s extremely safe, common and cheap.
Vaccines were rushed. Long term adverse reactions are unknown, some adverse reactions are now noticeable and worrying.
Pharmaceutical companies have economical incentives to push for new drugs/vaccines and against out of patents ones. These incentives are skewing media reporting, social media policies and basic research to push pro-vaccine content, and to censor warnings on vaccine safety or potentially safer drug alternatives that might result in vaccines losing their Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
Bret Weinstein’s idea to solve the issue is to find some deep-pocketed sense-making individual or set of people who can buy the pharmaceutical companies out. He thinks that would kill the economical incentives and allow sense to be made.
That was, I think, a fair representation of what they were trying to say and I don’t necessarily buy any of it.
Before I try to unpack it note that I’ve listened to Bret (the host) a fair bit, and he has a positive influence on my priors.
Robert Malone: I didn’t know anything about him until I watched this. He sounds balanced, knowledgeable and well connected. His historical involvement with mRNA vaccinology checks out. His recent gigs are way less transparent.
Steve Kirsch: sounds obnoxious and cranky. I’d tend to be dismissive but both Malone and Weinstein seem to see past his style and to agree on his content.
From the conversation it seems he’s well off and financed some trials on Fluvoxamine out of his own pocket.
1. Ivermectin
It’s many smallish studies, and if you think their biases cancel out you come out thinking an effect cannot be there by chance. I don’t know of any big study, but at this point I buy that IVM is unreasonably good.
The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive for the 55 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 23 trillion (p = 0.000000000000043). The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of cases has been remarkable. It is extremely unlikely that the observed results could have occurred by chance.
NIH has some official criticism to some of these studies. Typically that they’re either small or non blinded.
2. Vaccines
Lack of animal trials
Malone claims the current vaccines skipped animal trials. Humans are the first animals. Some animal testing would have shown the spike protein is an actual active agent, in lack of this knowledge FDA just gambled it wasn’t.
Second big inconvenient truth is that the spike protein is the actual active agent, in terms of eliciting an immune response. And in the case of the traditional vaccines, the dose of spike protein is defined relatively precisely. With the genetic vaccines, it is not (to the best of my knowledge). I know of no data wherein the mean, median, range etc of total amount of spike protein produced in a patient after administration of the COVID genetic vaccine has been defined. Usually, the FDA is quite persnickety about such things, but I am not aware of this key variable having been determined. Therefore, the range and severety of adverse events potentially attributable to the level of expressed spike protein may reflect patient to patient differences in genetic transfer efficiency and subsequent spike expression.
Is the spike protein toxic?
I don’t know.
They say “we now know”, but I can’t tell.
There’s a bunch of papers that mention cytotoxicity but I’m not quite sure of what that means. Most of the related points they make seem speculations on top of this point, see next point
Free spike protein?
They claim the vaccine antigen/debris is supposed to stay around the injection point. I don’t know why that would need to be the case.
They found circulation
(paper), and the worry seems to come from their claim that now you have the toxic S protein circulating.
That could explain coagulation problems, even though the mechanism is not clear to me.
They are particularly worried about the accumulation in bone marrow and ovaries 48h after taking mRNA vaccines.
They mention a cautionary tale, Thalidomide, Malone denounces the lack of reproductive toxicology.
They claim that the circuation wasn’t originally made public say they originally found this via FOIA request to some Japanese authority (pdf).
Pfizer vs Moderna: dosage
Phase 3 trials are optimized to prove efficacy, not to find the minimal dose to have sufficient effect. I find this reasonable on its own.
Malone recommends Pfizer over Moderna as it has lower dosage and similar efficacy. Presumably because adverse reactions are proportional to dosage?
Antibody-dependent enhancement? (ADE)
ADE are new behaviors that viruses get after they bind to antibodies.
In particular the “tail” of the antibody can bind to things that virus alone can’t bind to, so if you have circulating antibodies bound to the virus you can circulate the virus in many more places.
This happens in Dengue, you get a minor disease up on first infection, and risk a much worse one on re-infection.
Malone claims we don’t yet see ADE induced by vaccines (which is good), but that all previous attempts to create an anti-coronavirus vaccine failed due to ADE.
I had no way to verify this yet.
Should you get vaccinated?
Kirsch has a post about this, collecting much of the material, the tone is similar as in the video.
In the video they go as far as saying that if you’re young or a woman the risk/benefit seems to be against vaccination.
3. Pharmaceutical companies
The analysis sounds like a conspiracy.
One of the most glaring point in their favor is the standard that was applied to Remdesivir, a still-under-patent repurposed drug. FDA required a single study (n=1063) to give it EUA, which is a much lower standard than applied to IVM.
Of course it doesn’t mean there is a conspiracy, but it might very well be the net-resulting force of one sided nudging.
This ended up much longer than I anticipated.
I didn’t like the style of all of this, but the content seems interesting.
“The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2:” this paper is explicitly critiqued, not least the sensational claim of a 1 in 23 trillion chance of the positive effect being random. (this isn’t how statistical analysis works, apparently...)
There’s also criticism of the Bryant and Lawrie paper.
The key paper that shows cytotoxicty from the spike protein is with regards to the spike protein found in sars-cov-2, according to Gorski and the papers he cites the s-protein created via the mrna vaccines is modified to attach to cells in the muscle rather than freely circulating. (Its since been found that there are circulating levels of spike protein post mrna vaccine but in extremely small quantities, far lower than you’d get via an infection, and that the clearance of the protein is as expected for the proper functioning of the vaccine. ( https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/15/the-novavax-vaccine-data-and-spike-proteins-in-general ) )
The Japanese biodistribution data is also debunked, the study is in rats, the percentage build up in the ovaries is exceptionally small and studies have been completed looking specifically at ovarian function post mrna vaccine with no issues found. The Japanese data is at the center of Byram Bridle’s claims, which is systematically debunked here https://byrambridle.com/ .
I’m also unware of any info on ADE.
I’ve been vaccinated with one dose of Pfizer with no side effects. I’m waiting on the imminent CDC emergency panel on myocarditis to gauge whether it makes any sense getting a second dose.
There’s a lot of talk about the molnupiravir being invested in (a Merck product I believe) and concerns about an Alzheimer’s drug that the FDA have recently approved despite apparently scant evidence and evidence of toxicity.
I may not have time to read through all of that, but thanks for the links. I quickly learned some new things by following a few links there + googling around.
Most notably, some key evidence presented by Steve K that took center stage in the video, both evidence of the dangers of “the vaccines” and evidence of the effectiveness of ivermectin, comes from groups led by the same person, Theresa Lawrie.
Lawrie apparently founded a web site for ivermectin advocacy (registered March 7, 2021) after presenting evidence on Ivermectin’s efficacy on January 13 (to “13 clinicians” and 7 others)
Lawrie is the director of a group of 4 people calling itself “The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy” that called for “an immediate halt to the [Covid] vaccination programme” on June 9
Lawrie published the meta-analysis Steve was raving about (with 6 co-authors), which found “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin” (published June 17 but, obviously, completed earlier)
Now, is Lawrie just one of those productivity superheroes vying for a Nobel prize? Or is there something suspicious about too much evidence and advocacy coming from the same person?
What makes me the most suspicious is that
the anti-vaccine document performs no cost/benefit analysis before concluding that all three vaccines are too dangerous to use.
it includes no analysis of base rates (the number of adverse health events that would normally occur in a large population in the absence of any vaccines).
Edit 1: seriously, what are the chances that all three vaccines are both dangerous and equally so? Has that ever happened in history? I think not. (4 different vaccines are implicitly demonized by the video since it talks about US and UK data, but this document is UK-specific; the UK and US have used 3 vaccine brands each)
Edit 2: I don’t say this enough, but one must also consider the reaction of other experts. Large numbers of other experts think the vaccines are safe (safe enough to deploy widely, anyway) and that ivermectin is an interesting treatment but unproven. When experts in high places thought there was a risk of rare blood clots, they were often willing to halt the use of a vaccine even when doing so would lead to a larger number of overall Covid deaths. And of course, while regulatory agencies were understandably in a hurry, separate phase-3 trials were completed on each vaccine (in multiple countries) and showed adequate safety as usual. So the idea that these same experts and agencies are ignoring a wide variety of side-effects, including death, seems preposterous. The only argument I’ve seen against these numerous other visible experts comes from my father, who claimed the media is hiding information because they are controlled by George Soros, and from this video, which explains it as groupthink & social norms. As if scientists but not conservatives do groupthink & social norms.
I only skimmed the document, but I don’t see any lip service paid to any of these issues or objections. And these are obvious objections, aren’t they? So why wouldn’t they be considered?
In the absence of other information, I assume that the lack of care demonstrated in this document is typical for Lawrie.
Unfortunately, my post ended up doing something I disapprove of: it listens to a handful of outspoken scientists (one in particular, it turns out) while utterly ignoring the majority who disagree. I hoped other LessWrong users would tell me how other scientists/experts are arguing the other side, but I got less of that than I hoped.
seriously, what are the chances that all three vaccines are both dangerous and equally so?
Malone/Weinstein say they seem to have minor differences, at least in mechanism/effect. Their point being that if you get the S p circulating you’re in trouble. All the three seem to produce that effect.
One must also consider the reaction of other experts [...] When experts in high places thought there was a risk of rare blood clots, they were often willing to halt [...]
Well done, this is a very well put and good point.
I don’t know what drove the craze on blood clot (very few instances too?) against AZ and J&J.
It’s weirdly inconsistent with the reaction on myocarditis for mRNA vaccines, they only (reasonably?) halted on young population? It looks like a different standard than for AZ/J&J.
Well, Moderna and Pfizer’s are both mRNA-based, but presumably different in some ways because they were made by different teams (and I thought I saw Bret or Dr. Malone say he would have preferred Pfizer over Moderna, though it’s not in my summary). But AstraZeneca and J&J are “adenovirus vector vaccines”, using chimpanzee adenovirus ChAdOx1 and serotype 26 (HAdV-D26) respectively; the latter was “under investigation as [a] protective platform against HIV, Zika, RSV infections and are in Phase-III clinical trials for Ebola” in early 2019. Now, adenovirus vector technology is pretty new. Even so, it would be an impressive coincidence if the risks were both substantial and the same for a ChAdOx1-based vaccine, a HAdV-D26-based vaccine and both RNA vaccines. Sure, they all use the spike protein in some way — probably it’s necessary for the immune system to recognize the spike protein — but (i) eventually our bodies will encounter the spikes, either via SARS-Cov-2 or via vaccine, and I’ve seen no one make a case that a live, replicating virus is safer, and (ii) the evidence/argument for the protein itself being dangerous hasn’t been made clear in any of the stuff I’ve seen.
But my main point is the seeming lack of interest from Lawrie, Dowswell, Kirsch et al. in the question of relative safety, because this is a known failure mode of anti-vaxxers all the way back to the Wakefield study. That infamous paper apparently linked the MMR vaccine to autism, yet many anti-vaxxers acted like there was some fully general link between all vaccines and autism.
There’s also criticism of the Bryant and Lawrie paper.
What’s an actual criticism of that paper from that article?
That meta-studies are garbage-in-garbage-out? That’s weak at best, the author seems to have spent no time in spot checking any of the papers included to check whether this actually happened.
The Japanese data is at the center of Byram Bridle’s claims, which is systematically debunked …
… by a nameless “Concerned Scientist”. I don’t want to play ranking authorities, but it’s obvious someone is mad at Bridle enough to steal his name to put up that website.
It’s hard to read that website assuming good faith, at least Bridle seems courageous enough to argue his points in the open under his own name, like any “Scientist” should do, especially “Concerned” ones.
Regarding the spike protein toxicity, my understanding is that the claim is a bit more nuanced.
A recent tweet from Malone says:
The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is cytotoxic. That is a fact. Who says so? Multiple peer reviewed references. The Salk Institute.
It is the responsibility of the vaccine developers to demonstrate that their expressed version is not toxic.
Show us.
And then links to this Salk article.
Basically claiming that we know SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is cytotoxic and unless proven otherwise it’s fair to assume the version expressed by vaccines is similarly cytotoxic.
All the “fact-checker” linked from that website are “we have no evidence that [...]”, and this is very much a case in which absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I’ve seen this paper used over, and over, and over by antivaxxers. But a coauthor of that paper, who was horrified about how it was being used, says:
Congrats to @OgataAlana on this important study. Many asked how much spike protein gets into circulation after vaccination. Turns out to average ~30-40 pg/mL for a few days then disappears. FYI: This is ~100,000x less than used in our paper (4 ug/mL). https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-ar
I challenge anyone to name any vaccine or protein (or whatever) that is safe at the normal dosage and ALSO safe at a dose 10,000x or 100,000x higher. An extreme dose being hazardous is not surprising. It logically follows that if an extreme dose is harmful, it doesn’t mean a dose 100,000x lower is harmful.
The whole video is painful to watch, it gets more bearable after the 2:11 mark when Kirsch (the blue shirt guy) slows a bit down.
The following is a recap of what I’ve understood them saying and some unpacking. I’m not educated in anything medical and still have a bunch of open question. If you spot any error or know the answer to these questions please let me know.
TL;DW
They seem to be making 3 main points:
Ivermectin prevents and treats SARS-CoV-2. It’s extremely safe, common and cheap.
Vaccines were rushed. Long term adverse reactions are unknown, some adverse reactions are now noticeable and worrying.
Pharmaceutical companies have economical incentives to push for new drugs/vaccines and against out of patents ones. These incentives are skewing media reporting, social media policies and basic research to push pro-vaccine content, and to censor warnings on vaccine safety or potentially safer drug alternatives that might result in vaccines losing their Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
Bret Weinstein’s idea to solve the issue is to find some deep-pocketed sense-making individual or set of people who can buy the pharmaceutical companies out. He thinks that would kill the economical incentives and allow sense to be made.
That was, I think, a fair representation of what they were trying to say and I don’t necessarily buy any of it.
Before I try to unpack it note that I’ve listened to Bret (the host) a fair bit, and he has a positive influence on my priors.
Robert Malone: I didn’t know anything about him until I watched this. He sounds balanced, knowledgeable and well connected. His historical involvement with mRNA vaccinology checks out. His recent gigs are way less transparent.
Steve Kirsch: sounds obnoxious and cranky. I’d tend to be dismissive but both Malone and Weinstein seem to see past his style and to agree on his content. From the conversation it seems he’s well off and financed some trials on Fluvoxamine out of his own pocket.
1. Ivermectin
It’s many smallish studies, and if you think their biases cancel out you come out thinking an effect cannot be there by chance. I don’t know of any big study, but at this point I buy that IVM is unreasonably good.
Source: The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2: An evidence-based clinical review article, on Nature’s The Journal of Antibiotics, quoting ivmmeta.com which collects a bunch of studies.
Other resources:
Ivermectin for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis, another metastudy by Bryant and Lawrie
NIH has some official criticism to some of these studies. Typically that they’re either small or non blinded.
2. Vaccines
Lack of animal trials
Malone claims the current vaccines skipped animal trials. Humans are the first animals. Some animal testing would have shown the spike protein is an actual active agent, in lack of this knowledge FDA just gambled it wasn’t.
On LinkedIn he wrote:
Is the spike protein toxic?
I don’t know.
They say “we now know”, but I can’t tell.
There’s a bunch of papers that mention cytotoxicity but I’m not quite sure of what that means. Most of the related points they make seem speculations on top of this point, see next point
Free spike protein?
They claim the vaccine antigen/debris is supposed to stay around the injection point. I don’t know why that would need to be the case.
They found circulation (paper), and the worry seems to come from their claim that now you have the toxic S protein circulating.
That could explain coagulation problems, even though the mechanism is not clear to me.
They are particularly worried about the accumulation in bone marrow and ovaries 48h after taking mRNA vaccines.
They mention a cautionary tale, Thalidomide, Malone denounces the lack of reproductive toxicology.
They claim that the circuation wasn’t originally made public say they originally found this via FOIA request to some Japanese authority (pdf).
Pfizer vs Moderna: dosage
Phase 3 trials are optimized to prove efficacy, not to find the minimal dose to have sufficient effect. I find this reasonable on its own.
Malone recommends Pfizer over Moderna as it has lower dosage and similar efficacy. Presumably because adverse reactions are proportional to dosage?
Antibody-dependent enhancement? (ADE)
ADE are new behaviors that viruses get after they bind to antibodies.
In particular the “tail” of the antibody can bind to things that virus alone can’t bind to, so if you have circulating antibodies bound to the virus you can circulate the virus in many more places. This happens in Dengue, you get a minor disease up on first infection, and risk a much worse one on re-infection.
Malone claims we don’t yet see ADE induced by vaccines (which is good), but that all previous attempts to create an anti-coronavirus vaccine failed due to ADE.
I had no way to verify this yet.
Should you get vaccinated?
Kirsch has a post about this, collecting much of the material, the tone is similar as in the video.
In the video they go as far as saying that if you’re young or a woman the risk/benefit seems to be against vaccination.
3. Pharmaceutical companies
The analysis sounds like a conspiracy.
One of the most glaring point in their favor is the standard that was applied to Remdesivir, a still-under-patent repurposed drug. FDA required a single study (n=1063) to give it EUA, which is a much lower standard than applied to IVM.
Of course it doesn’t mean there is a conspiracy, but it might very well be the net-resulting force of one sided nudging.
This ended up much longer than I anticipated. I didn’t like the style of all of this, but the content seems interesting.
As I mentioned in my post, blog posts by David Gorski systematically address most of the issues you’ve highlighted ( https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine-take-2/ )
Ivermectin:
“The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2:” this paper is explicitly critiqued, not least the sensational claim of a 1 in 23 trillion chance of the positive effect being random. (this isn’t how statistical analysis works, apparently...)
There’s also criticism of the Bryant and Lawrie paper.
On twitter recently Malone has acknowledged his mistake having been presented with evidence of dosing analysis by Pfizer ( https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1406555309200531458 )
The key paper that shows cytotoxicty from the spike protein is with regards to the spike protein found in sars-cov-2, according to Gorski and the papers he cites the s-protein created via the mrna vaccines is modified to attach to cells in the muscle rather than freely circulating. (Its since been found that there are circulating levels of spike protein post mrna vaccine but in extremely small quantities, far lower than you’d get via an infection, and that the clearance of the protein is as expected for the proper functioning of the vaccine. ( https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/15/the-novavax-vaccine-data-and-spike-proteins-in-general ) )
The Japanese biodistribution data is also debunked, the study is in rats, the percentage build up in the ovaries is exceptionally small and studies have been completed looking specifically at ovarian function post mrna vaccine with no issues found. The Japanese data is at the center of Byram Bridle’s claims, which is systematically debunked here https://byrambridle.com/ .
I’m also unware of any info on ADE.
I’ve been vaccinated with one dose of Pfizer with no side effects. I’m waiting on the imminent CDC emergency panel on myocarditis to gauge whether it makes any sense getting a second dose.
There’s a lot of talk about the molnupiravir being invested in (a Merck product I believe) and concerns about an Alzheimer’s drug that the FDA have recently approved despite apparently scant evidence and evidence of toxicity.
I may not have time to read through all of that, but thanks for the links. I quickly learned some new things by following a few links there + googling around.
Most notably, some key evidence presented by Steve K that took center stage in the video, both evidence of the dangers of “the vaccines” and evidence of the effectiveness of ivermectin, comes from groups led by the same person, Theresa Lawrie.
Lawrie apparently founded a web site for ivermectin advocacy (registered March 7, 2021) after presenting evidence on Ivermectin’s efficacy on January 13 (to “13 clinicians” and 7 others)
Lawrie is the director of a group of 4 people calling itself “The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy” that called for “an immediate halt to the [Covid] vaccination programme” on June 9
Lawrie published the meta-analysis Steve was raving about (with 6 co-authors), which found “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin” (published June 17 but, obviously, completed earlier)
Now, is Lawrie just one of those productivity superheroes vying for a Nobel prize? Or is there something suspicious about too much evidence and advocacy coming from the same person?
What makes me the most suspicious is that
the anti-vaccine document performs no cost/benefit analysis before concluding that all three vaccines are too dangerous to use.
it includes no analysis of base rates (the number of adverse health events that would normally occur in a large population in the absence of any vaccines).
Edit 1: seriously, what are the chances that all three vaccines are both dangerous and equally so? Has that ever happened in history? I think not. (4 different vaccines are implicitly demonized by the video since it talks about US and UK data, but this document is UK-specific; the UK and US have used 3 vaccine brands each)
Edit 2: I don’t say this enough, but one must also consider the reaction of other experts. Large numbers of other experts think the vaccines are safe (safe enough to deploy widely, anyway) and that ivermectin is an interesting treatment but unproven. When experts in high places thought there was a risk of rare blood clots, they were often willing to halt the use of a vaccine even when doing so would lead to a larger number of overall Covid deaths. And of course, while regulatory agencies were understandably in a hurry, separate phase-3 trials were completed on each vaccine (in multiple countries) and showed adequate safety as usual. So the idea that these same experts and agencies are ignoring a wide variety of side-effects, including death, seems preposterous. The only argument I’ve seen against these numerous other visible experts comes from my father, who claimed the media is hiding information because they are controlled by George Soros, and from this video, which explains it as groupthink & social norms. As if scientists but not conservatives do groupthink & social norms.
I only skimmed the document, but I don’t see any lip service paid to any of these issues or objections. And these are obvious objections, aren’t they? So why wouldn’t they be considered?
In the absence of other information, I assume that the lack of care demonstrated in this document is typical for Lawrie.
Unfortunately, my post ended up doing something I disapprove of: it listens to a handful of outspoken scientists (one in particular, it turns out) while utterly ignoring the majority who disagree. I hoped other LessWrong users would tell me how other scientists/experts are arguing the other side, but I got less of that than I hoped.
Malone/Weinstein say they seem to have minor differences, at least in mechanism/effect. Their point being that if you get the S p circulating you’re in trouble. All the three seem to produce that effect.
Well done, this is a very well put and good point. I don’t know what drove the craze on blood clot (very few instances too?) against AZ and J&J. It’s weirdly inconsistent with the reaction on myocarditis for mRNA vaccines, they only (reasonably?) halted on young population? It looks like a different standard than for AZ/J&J.
Well, Moderna and Pfizer’s are both mRNA-based, but presumably different in some ways because they were made by different teams (and I thought I saw Bret or Dr. Malone say he would have preferred Pfizer over Moderna, though it’s not in my summary). But AstraZeneca and J&J are “adenovirus vector vaccines”, using chimpanzee adenovirus ChAdOx1 and serotype 26 (HAdV-D26) respectively; the latter was “under investigation as [a] protective platform against HIV, Zika, RSV infections and are in Phase-III clinical trials for Ebola” in early 2019. Now, adenovirus vector technology is pretty new. Even so, it would be an impressive coincidence if the risks were both substantial and the same for a ChAdOx1-based vaccine, a HAdV-D26-based vaccine and both RNA vaccines. Sure, they all use the spike protein in some way — probably it’s necessary for the immune system to recognize the spike protein — but (i) eventually our bodies will encounter the spikes, either via SARS-Cov-2 or via vaccine, and I’ve seen no one make a case that a live, replicating virus is safer, and (ii) the evidence/argument for the protein itself being dangerous hasn’t been made clear in any of the stuff I’ve seen.
But my main point is the seeming lack of interest from Lawrie, Dowswell, Kirsch et al. in the question of relative safety, because this is a known failure mode of anti-vaxxers all the way back to the Wakefield study. That infamous paper apparently linked the MMR vaccine to autism, yet many anti-vaxxers acted like there was some fully general link between all vaccines and autism.
What’s an actual criticism of that paper from that article? That meta-studies are garbage-in-garbage-out? That’s weak at best, the author seems to have spent no time in spot checking any of the papers included to check whether this actually happened.
… by a nameless “Concerned Scientist”. I don’t want to play ranking authorities, but it’s obvious someone is mad at Bridle enough to steal his name to put up that website. It’s hard to read that website assuming good faith, at least Bridle seems courageous enough to argue his points in the open under his own name, like any “Scientist” should do, especially “Concerned” ones.
Regarding the spike protein toxicity, my understanding is that the claim is a bit more nuanced. A recent tweet from Malone says:
And then links to this Salk article.
Basically claiming that we know SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is cytotoxic and unless proven otherwise it’s fair to assume the version expressed by vaccines is similarly cytotoxic.
All the “fact-checker” linked from that website are “we have no evidence that [...]”, and this is very much a case in which absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I’ve seen this paper used over, and over, and over by antivaxxers. But a coauthor of that paper, who was horrified about how it was being used, says:
I challenge anyone to name any vaccine or protein (or whatever) that is safe at the normal dosage and ALSO safe at a dose 10,000x or 100,000x higher. An extreme dose being hazardous is not surprising. It logically follows that if an extreme dose is harmful, it doesn’t mean a dose 100,000x lower is harmful.