[ExI] conspiracy theories, was: RE: Satoshi

[John Clark]

> *> John your brand of arrogance kills people.*
>

*Arrogance can't kill people but ignorance can, and that's why I'm not
ashamed of myself. Spike, I like you but I think you're spreading lethal
medical miss information, and you should be ashamed of that.  *


> *> The mRNA didn’t save billions of lives.  *
>

*True but the Covid vaccine did save millions of lives, and mRNA Technology
has the potential to save billions of lives if Luddite ignoramuses don't
stamp it out first. *


> *> The vaccine might have helped some.  We don’t know how much. *
>

*Well ... some people don't know much. Let's do some historical research
and divide Americans from January 2020 into two groups: *

*1) People who got their news primarily from Twitter/X, Breitbart and Fox.*

*2) People who got their news primarily from Science, Nature and The New
York Times.*

*You'll find that people from group #2 were FAR more likely to live through
the next 2 years without dying from Covid than people from group #1. Why is
that? Because ignorance can be lethal, although people from group #1
wouldn't explain it that way, they would say the only reason it's true is
because reality has a liberal bias.*


*> But no, to your point, I don’t wonder why you don’t like TwitterX.
> TwitterX represents freedom of speech, it promotes freedom of speech. *
>

*Yes, Twitter/X hands a $44 billion megaphone to any jackass that wants one
and lets him say anything he wants no matter how stupid or ignorant it may
be with one important exception, and that exception makes it similar to the
Chinese concept of press freedom. In China you're not allowed to even hint
at any criticism of Mao Zedong, and on Twitter/X you're not allowed to even
hint at any criticism of the richest man in the world. *


> *> It provides a platform for billions who would not otherwise have
> freedom of speech. *
>

*Freedom of speech means you are allowed to say anything you like, it does
not mean you have a God-given right to say it so loudly that people are
forced to listen to it. *

* > I never took the mRNA vaccine.*


*I must've received 9 or 10 mRNA vaccine shots over the years and I never
got Covid, but I seem to remember you saying that you did. *

*>The virus has evolved to be less lethal. *[...]  Note what percentage of
the population still get the covid vaccines.

*I gave the following question to GPT: *

*ME: A friend of mine claimed that the Covid virus vaccine didn't work and
the only reason COVID is not killing people at the rate it once did is
because it evolved to become less lethal; as proof he offered the fact that
most Americans have not kept up-to-date with their COVID vaccine
immunizations but the death toll from COVID is still far less than what it
once was. What do you think?*

*And this is how Mr. GPT responded: *

*GPT: "*I think your friend is *wrong about the central claim*, although
there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying: *SARS-CoV-2 did change
substantially, and the Omicron lineage and its descendants generally
produce less severe disease than the original virus.* But that does *not*
explain the enormous reduction in COVID mortality by itself.

The evidence strongly supports a *combination of factors*, with vaccination
and immunity from previous infection being major ones.
1. The vaccines definitely worked against severe COVID

The important distinction is between *preventing infection* and *preventing
serious disease*.

The vaccines turned out to be much less durable at preventing
infection—particularly after Omicron emerged—than people initially hoped.
But they were substantially better at preventing hospitalization, ICU
admission, and death.

For example, CDC's analysis of the 2023–24 vaccine found that, among
adults, vaccination reduced the risk of critical illness by about *70%
during the first two months*, with protection declining to roughly *50%
over the following months*. Hospitalization risk was reduced by about *50%
initially*

And this isn't just an inference from the overall decline in deaths. We can
compare vaccinated and unvaccinated people directly. During the Omicron
period, for example, a very large study of elderly people found that
vaccination substantially reduced mortality; recent boosting reduced the
risk of death still further.

More recently, the 2024–25 vaccine was estimated to reduce hospitalization
in older adults by approximately *45–46%* during the first several months
after vaccination.

So saying *"the vaccine didn't work"* is simply inconsistent with the
evidence.
2. But your friend is right about one thing: the virus became less dangerous

This is important.

The transition from the original Wuhan strain → Alpha → Delta → Omicron
involved major changes in the virus. Omicron became extraordinarily
transmissible but, on average, caused less severe disease than Delta.

But there's a subtle point here:

*"Omicron is intrinsically less lethal" and "people have much more
immunity" are two different things.*

Suppose you take the *same* virus and put it into two populations:

   - Population A: almost nobody has immunity.
   - Population B: almost everybody has been vaccinated and/or previously
   infected.

The second population will have dramatically fewer deaths even if the virus
itself hasn't become any less lethal.

And in reality, *both things happened simultaneously*.
3. Natural immunity is also an enormous part of the story

This is something that often gets lost in arguments on either side.

By now, essentially the entire American population has some combination of:

*vaccination + previous infection + repeated exposures.*

CDC estimates that more than *99% of American adults* have either been
vaccinated, infected, or both.

So when someone says:

"Most Americans aren't keeping up with their boosters, yet COVID isn't
killing many people anymore."

there is an important missing variable.

*Not being recently boosted does not mean having no immunity.*

Someone who received two or three vaccines and subsequently had COVID may
have considerable immune protection even if their last vaccine was years
ago.

The current vaccines provide *additional* protection on top of that
existing immunity. That's why CDC now describes vaccine effectiveness in
terms of *incremental* protection.
4. There's a very good natural experiment that undermines his argument

Look at the United States in *2020 versus 2021*.

COVID was already declining substantially in some places before vaccination
became widespread, but once vaccination began, there was a very strong
divergence in outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

And then came Delta, which was *more*, not less, severe than the original
virus.

That is important because it demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 did *not* simply
evolve monotonically toward harmlessness.

The evolution was not:

deadly → less deadly → less deadly → harmless.

It was more like:

original → Alpha → *more severe Delta* → Omicron, which was generally less
severe per infection.

So the idea that evolution alone inevitably explains the decline doesn't
fit what actually happened.
5. There's another huge clue: deaths fell much faster than infections

This is probably the most intuitive way to understand what's happening.

Early in the pandemic, infection with SARS-CoV-2 was much more likely to
result in severe disease and death because the population had essentially *no
preexisting immunity*.

Later, enormous numbers of people were still getting infected—but the
fraction progressing to severe disease became dramatically smaller.

That's exactly what you'd expect from a population that has accumulated
immunity.

The modern vaccine isn't a force field that prevents the virus from
entering your body. Instead, it *prepares the immune system so that it can
respond much faster once the virus arrives.*

That's particularly important for preventing the virus from progressing to
the systemic, severe stage of COVID.

Your friend's observation—

*"People aren't getting regular boosters anymore, yet COVID deaths remain
much lower."*

—is *true*.

But his proposed explanation—

*"Therefore the vaccine didn't work and the virus simply evolved to become
less lethal."*

—doesn't follow.

A much better explanation is:

*The virus became somewhat less intrinsically severe and the human
population became vastly more immunologically prepared to deal with it.*

And we have direct evidence for the latter: when you compare vaccinated and
unvaccinated people, vaccination reduces severe disease and death. The
CDC's systematic review of the 2024–25 vaccine, for example, found pooled
observational estimates of about *44% protection against hospitalization
and 23% against death* in adolescents and adults.

So the fact that Americans don't need frequent vaccination to maintain
the *extremely
low mortality of 2026* doesn't demonstrate that vaccination was useless. It
is more analogous to saying:

*"Most people don't need to keep getting smallpox vaccinations every year,
therefore the original smallpox vaccine didn't work."*

The reason repeated vaccination isn't necessarily required to maintain the
same level of population-wide protection is that *immunity doesn't go back
to zero when vaccine-derived antibody levels decline*. Memory B cells, T
cells, and—very importantly in the case of COVID—immunity acquired through
subsequent infections remain.

So I'd say *your friend's argument confuses "the vaccine isn't 100%
effective and immunity wanes" with "the vaccine doesn't work."* Those are
very different propositions."

*John K Clark*
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