This is my first post on LW so I hope I get it right, please let me know if I don’t!
I’ve been a Geneticist for 15 years (academia and industry) and while there are several issues I feel people aren’t addressing with regards to Covid-19, the one that has me most concerned is the digital nature of these new vaccines, over the traditional analog method of letting your body figure out which antibodies it is going to develop on its own. So why is this an issue?
With RNA/DNA vaccines, you are essentially programing a person to have a very specific immunological state. An immunity that is perfectly identical/reproducable between individuals vaccinated against the same sequence, resulting in a real homogenous kind of protection across the population. Vaccines have traditionally left the act of designing the actual antibodies up to your immune system itself, with weakened/attenuated/fragmented versions of the disease presented but importantly no directions on what to do with it. Like any rigged fight, the outcome is known in advance, but the specifics of the fight very much depends on the specifics of the night, and of course dumb luck. As a result we develop different sets of different polyclonal antibodies from one person to the next using the traditional vaccination method.
It means something significant that one can essentially put people into immunological cohorts with identical reactions to a known substance/sequence. Particularly when we all must trust that what goes into your arm in the doctor’s office is really what it says on the tin. If the RNA/DNA vaccination method is as generic, safe, reliable and interchangeable as everyone hopes, that dramatically increases the ability to give people slightly different coded immunological states without them ever knowing. Barcoding through vaccination, essentially.
What does it mean that we can now tag taxi drivers from Essex who make less than $50,000 a year with one vaccine, and nurses from London over the age of 40 with another, without either knowing that they’ve been tagged or without any understanding that this may mean their immune system can be targeted selectively in the future?
If this tagging hypothesis is correct, we can make a few predictions for what we are likely see over the next few months:
1) A hardline position taken on DIY vaccines, or vaccines from foreign governments, because they introduce noise into the system and thereby undermine it’s utility. People who have evidence of being vaccinated in Japan, for example, will be required to get vaccinated again upon entering the UK even though an antibody test has shown they are positive for vaccination against Covid-19 already. Because it isn’t about preventing the disease, it’s about aquiring the tag.
2) If the tags do not contain coded information specific to the individual (i.e. they give the exact same thing to everyone in the same cohort), you would expect to see an increase in the notion of frequent/excessive revaccintion, because of course people don’t only belong to 1 cohort at a time. You would want to layer people up with different tags to fully describe their position in society, since you can’t do it in the actual vaccination’s sequence alone.
3) You would expect something akin to “vaccination events”, where a call is put out to people of a desired cohort to self-identify and come in for their vaccine at the same time/place. The alternative—keeping all the cohorts in a cupboard and selecting the right one for the person standing in your office—is just not going to scale. For starters those giving the injections need to be in on it in the latter example, whereas with “vaccination events” only the event co-ordinator (or more specifically, the vaccine supplier) needs be in the know. Locality alone is a definable cohort so of course vaccination events aren’t a certainty, but what is certain is that it makes more sense from a tagging perspective than an immunisation perspective to create a concentration of unvaccinated people.
4) Situations where those that attended a well defined vaccination event all react in the same way, but different to a group of people who attended a different vaccination event, despite the manufacturer’s claims that they got the exact same vaccine. Perhaps if the difference is as stark as death vs no-death between otherwise identical groups, an inquiry will be lauched upon which it will turn out that “small batch differences between vaccines that were previously thought to be inconsequential”… turn out to be pretty consequential. So is the jig up at that point? Absolutely not, infact it would be desirable for this to happen as far as the pharmaceutical companies are concerned, because now they can come clean about these delibrate (non-consequential) differences used by manufacturers for “in house” identification of the different batches. Having not read this prediction beforehand and adjusting your baysian priors, the news of this will seem completely reasonable to people and in fact a smart thing to do. Skeptics who haven’t considered that there might be seemingly legitimate reasons for the existance of non-consequential differences between vaccines will refrain from asking further questions, and those that don’t drop the “tagging conspiracy” will be ridiculed. The focus will be on keeping the tags non-consequential, rather than removing them entirely.
In conclusion, while I accept this all sounds kind of nutty, barcoding things with custom DNA sequences is what I have spent most of my life doing. Geneticists know that DNA sequencers essentially do such barcoding at the individual fragment level as a required step of many sequencing protocols. It is extrodinarily unlikely—no, impossible—that those developing nucleotide-base vaccines wouldn’t have considered this possibility. What’s odd is that I haven’t seen anyone in the field talk about it.
The dangers of digital vaccines
This is my first post on LW so I hope I get it right, please let me know if I don’t!
I’ve been a Geneticist for 15 years (academia and industry) and while there are several issues I feel people aren’t addressing with regards to Covid-19, the one that has me most concerned is the digital nature of these new vaccines, over the traditional analog method of letting your body figure out which antibodies it is going to develop on its own. So why is this an issue?
With RNA/DNA vaccines, you are essentially programing a person to have a very specific immunological state. An immunity that is perfectly identical/reproducable between individuals vaccinated against the same sequence, resulting in a real homogenous kind of protection across the population. Vaccines have traditionally left the act of designing the actual antibodies up to your immune system itself, with weakened/attenuated/fragmented versions of the disease presented but importantly no directions on what to do with it. Like any rigged fight, the outcome is known in advance, but the specifics of the fight very much depends on the specifics of the night, and of course dumb luck. As a result we develop different sets of different polyclonal antibodies from one person to the next using the traditional vaccination method.
It means something significant that one can essentially put people into immunological cohorts with identical reactions to a known substance/sequence. Particularly when we all must trust that what goes into your arm in the doctor’s office is really what it says on the tin. If the RNA/DNA vaccination method is as generic, safe, reliable and interchangeable as everyone hopes, that dramatically increases the ability to give people slightly different coded immunological states without them ever knowing. Barcoding through vaccination, essentially.
What does it mean that we can now tag taxi drivers from Essex who make less than $50,000 a year with one vaccine, and nurses from London over the age of 40 with another, without either knowing that they’ve been tagged or without any understanding that this may mean their immune system can be targeted selectively in the future?
If this tagging hypothesis is correct, we can make a few predictions for what we are likely see over the next few months:
1) A hardline position taken on DIY vaccines, or vaccines from foreign governments, because they introduce noise into the system and thereby undermine it’s utility. People who have evidence of being vaccinated in Japan, for example, will be required to get vaccinated again upon entering the UK even though an antibody test has shown they are positive for vaccination against Covid-19 already. Because it isn’t about preventing the disease, it’s about aquiring the tag.
2) If the tags do not contain coded information specific to the individual (i.e. they give the exact same thing to everyone in the same cohort), you would expect to see an increase in the notion of frequent/excessive revaccintion, because of course people don’t only belong to 1 cohort at a time. You would want to layer people up with different tags to fully describe their position in society, since you can’t do it in the actual vaccination’s sequence alone.
3) You would expect something akin to “vaccination events”, where a call is put out to people of a desired cohort to self-identify and come in for their vaccine at the same time/place. The alternative—keeping all the cohorts in a cupboard and selecting the right one for the person standing in your office—is just not going to scale. For starters those giving the injections need to be in on it in the latter example, whereas with “vaccination events” only the event co-ordinator (or more specifically, the vaccine supplier) needs be in the know. Locality alone is a definable cohort so of course vaccination events aren’t a certainty, but what is certain is that it makes more sense from a tagging perspective than an immunisation perspective to create a concentration of unvaccinated people.
4) Situations where those that attended a well defined vaccination event all react in the same way, but different to a group of people who attended a different vaccination event, despite the manufacturer’s claims that they got the exact same vaccine. Perhaps if the difference is as stark as death vs no-death between otherwise identical groups, an inquiry will be lauched upon which it will turn out that “small batch differences between vaccines that were previously thought to be inconsequential”… turn out to be pretty consequential. So is the jig up at that point? Absolutely not, infact it would be desirable for this to happen as far as the pharmaceutical companies are concerned, because now they can come clean about these delibrate (non-consequential) differences used by manufacturers for “in house” identification of the different batches. Having not read this prediction beforehand and adjusting your baysian priors, the news of this will seem completely reasonable to people and in fact a smart thing to do. Skeptics who haven’t considered that there might be seemingly legitimate reasons for the existance of non-consequential differences between vaccines will refrain from asking further questions, and those that don’t drop the “tagging conspiracy” will be ridiculed. The focus will be on keeping the tags non-consequential, rather than removing them entirely.
In conclusion, while I accept this all sounds kind of nutty, barcoding things with custom DNA sequences is what I have spent most of my life doing. Geneticists know that DNA sequencers essentially do such barcoding at the individual fragment level as a required step of many sequencing protocols. It is extrodinarily unlikely—no, impossible—that those developing nucleotide-base vaccines wouldn’t have considered this possibility. What’s odd is that I haven’t seen anyone in the field talk about it.
EDIT: So the CEO of Moderna apparently agrees this is a digital vaccine, and a lot of what I descibe above and in the comments he touches on in this presentation: Moderna CEO Describes the Vaccine As An Operating System