Jabnarok and Pharmageddon

In 1960 the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote an article titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. It’s a question I’ve often pondered, although without the benefit of the penetrating mind of Wigner. Here’s a quote from the article

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

In essence, what all this means for me is that we can prat around with some squiggles, bugger about with a few integrals, cook up some models, and, hey presto, we are able to predict shit that really happens. WHY we are able to do this is something of a mystery. If I had to guess at an answer, it’s because our ability to categorize things (order them) as greater/lesser, nearer/further, which is a virtue of the physical world in which we live, imposes a metric structure to any description and limits the kind of ‘topology’ that’s going to work. But that’s probably just incoherent babble since I don’t really understand metric spaces or topology.

A similar kind of ‘mystery’ happens in maths. We count stuff. What could be more natural than that? 1 cow, 2 cows, 3 cows, etc. But then when we want to do simple stuff like divide our herd fairly between our children, for example, we realize that we might have to butcher one or two to get a fair distribution. A bit more thought and we realize that some numbers of cows just can’t be divided fairly (and still breathing) unless we have only 1 kid or a number of kids equal to the size of our herd. With 17 cows, I’d need 17 kids (or just 1) to be able to do a fair dishing out without having to get the saw out.

We then look at where all these special non-divisible numbers are in our list of numbers and scratch our heads and eventually realise that there’s a structure - their distribution amongst the other numbers follows a (complicated) law we can write down. Who the hell ordered that? We just counted shit - but ‘hidden’ in there is this complicated structure.

We are, in the mathematical sciences, lulled into something of a false sense of security. The very success, unreasonable or otherwise, of this mathematical description makes us a little giddy with power.

It all falls apart when we try to apply our vaunted squiggles to anything with a modicum of complexity. I remember taking a linear differential equations course in my undergraduate degree. It was a maths department course and it was thought us theoretical physicists could benefit from it. It was a bit of a culture shock to realize just how much more rigorous the mathematicians were in their approach to solving problems. But I’ll never forget the lecturer telling us at the outset, shaking his head in a voice filled with regret and with a fine Geordie accent

“This course is about linear differential equations. If you end up having to solve a non-linear differential equation you might as well just pack up your bags and go home”

He was only half joking.

It is a miracle, a magnificent achievement, that some utterly brilliant men and women have been able to describe our physical world as much as they have with this unreasonably effective language of mathematics. I don’t want to downplay their contributions, or their intellectual gifts.

But the very success of science, and in particular the mathematical sciences, might have led us into an unwarranted degree of hubris.

Give a competent physicist the problem of working out where a golf ball is going to land and, with just pen and paper, he or she is going to be able to give you a pretty decent prediction. Add in the models for air resistance, local wind conditions, and maybe spin, and a computer, and they’ll be able to give you an even better prediction. It might seem like arrogance when some physicist makes a confident prediction about something like this, but it’s not.

This is a golf ball. Someone thwacks it. It flies through the air subject to gravity, winds, and air resistance. I was going to say it’s not rocket science, but it kind of is.

Compared to what’s happening in the human body this problem is ridiculously simple. It’s like comparing the charming scribbles of a kindergartner with a Da Vinci.

Yet medical doctors and researchers often speak with the same degree of assured confidence that a ‘golf-ball’ physicist would. I think for many people there’s essentially no real difference - it’s all just “science” isn’t it?

One of the things I was fascinated by when I was working as a physicist was the possibility that plants make use of quantum entanglement in photosynthesis. I wondered if there was a simple model I could generate to get some insight into what was going on. Several (elementary) books on microbiology later, I was gradually dissolving in the tears of “holy fuck, this is insanely complicated - how does anyone properly understand this?” as it began to dawn on me just how amazing life, and evolution, really is.

And here’s the rub - we’ve seen how disastrous that “confidence” has been. It has been entirely misplaced. The whole Covid Jabnarok program has utterly unravelled like the monstrous alien structures being removed from the veins of the bodies on the embalmers’ tables. It has been a disaster. There is a case to be made, not a very compelling one in my view, that the Jabby Juice of Joy might, temporarily, afford some protection against serious symptoms of covid (and then, quite possibly, make it worse). But it has failed miserably in succeeding at what a vaccine is supposed to do - and that is to prevent infection (and, therefore, re-transmission) in the first place.

Prior to covid, we all took vaccines thinking we were getting protection against infection. That, we were so confidently told, was what they did. Prior to covid I had believed vaccines to be a kind of modern medical miracle, a proud and magnificent achievement of science. What has happened in practice is that, like so many others, I’ve come to realise that it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Some vaccines seem great, and others are just rubbish, if not downright dangerous.

What is abundantly clear is that, whilst we do know quite a bit about the wonderful workings of the human body, we don’t know anything like enough to warrant the degree of confidence we project about diseases and how to treat them. And remember that for nearly 5 decades we have been given entirely the wrong advice about nutrition (the food pyramid) because SCIENCE.

The so-called ‘reductionist’ approach to science has been very successful. Physicists have, bit by bit, taken apart atoms and otherwise abused them in order to try to understand their component parts. It works well up to the point it doesn’t. The old cliché about things being more than the sum of their component parts is nowhere more evident than in the human body itself. If you just did a straightforward reduction of the human body to its chemical constituents you’d be left with a bunch of relatively uninteresting chemicals. Put them together in the right way - and the only way we ‘know’ how to do that is through actual reproduction - and a kind of miracle happens.

It’s like that when we look at infections and diseases and how to treat them. A lot of focus is given to which bits of which molecule latch onto others and drugs are developed to try to prevent unwelcome couplings. It’s an approach not entirely without merit, and it has resulted in some treatments that have undoubtedly made the lives of sufferers easier. But I don’t think it’s the whole story, and probably not by a long way.

One of the things that struck me when I was reading about Jason Fung’s ideas surrounding the causes of obesity was just how complex the factors that go into the mix are. Our bodies are maintained in a delicate balance that relies on all sorts of biofeedback mechanisms, largely involving hormones, when it comes to our weight and eating behaviours. If you interrupt that balance, things can go badly wrong as the body tries to re-establish “service as normal”.

Even at a cellular level there are all sorts of biofeedback mechanisms that monitor the ‘health’ of an individual cell. Nick Lane’s wonderful book Oxygen¹ outlines some of the mechanisms.

Although I don’t have anything other than a superficial understanding of the “terrain theory” of disease, in my view it is important because it stresses the importance of the environment. The claim that things like viruses and bacteria don’t ‘cause’ disease is problematic for me, but the idea that an individual (potentially) disease-causing pathogen is going to be treated differently by different bodily environments seems kind of trite - but important, and one not properly stressed by our focus on a more mechanistic view of disease-causation.

If you’re overweight, stressed out, filled with various toxins from your diet or elsewhere, then you’re probably not going to be in the best shape to fight off any pathogen - and your biofeedback mechanisms are probably a bit out of kilter too. There’s no doubt in my mind that the simple model of bug, infect, disease, pill is too simplistic, even though it can work (the success of antibiotics, for example).

Intriguingly, there may be one very good reason why doctors are trained to be confident, and that’s the placebo effect. The power of our minds to affect what’s happening in our bodies is fascinating and not at all properly understood. Some of the remarkable experiments done on the placebo affect (and the equally fascinating nocebo effect) underline just how complex and not properly understood the human body is.

One of the problems with the success of modern medicine is its success. There’s no doubt that, overall, we’re better off because of it. We’re able to treat all sorts of conditions and make people’s lives better as a result. I’ve benefitted, so has my daughter who recently had a painful ovarian cyst removed. But, sometimes, success can be a double-edged sword. The success of a treatment might actually stop² us looking for better treatments, or worse, stop us properly researching preventative approaches.

The Covid Jabnarok has taught us some hard lessons - or at least those of us who haven’t swallowed the “vaccine gooderer and betterer than natural (acquired) immunity” party line. All ‘vaccines’ are not the same and slapping the label ‘vaccine’ on something does not magically transform some Godawful Goo into being “safe and effective”. Indeed, slapping the label ‘vaccine’ on something does not, automatically, turn it into a vaccine.

Perhaps the covid mRNA ‘vaccines’ only identify as being vaccines.

You can get an idea of the kind complexity involved in these issues by reading some of Geert Vanden Bossche’s writings. For most of his stuff I’m hopelessly out of my depth. I have no idea whether he’s talking nonsense or not. I strongly suspect not, because even though I can’t properly follow it all it’s clear he’s speaking from a consistent and well-understood³ knowledge base. The conclusions he draws might be incorrect (I don't know) but it's obvious he knows what he's talking about. Whether he's put the stuff he knows about together in the correct way is another matter (again I would suggest it's extremely unlikely that he's trivially wrong on a significant amount he says).

The very complexity of the sciences surrounding disease, its treatment and prevention, is, perhaps, one of the reasons why we’re so keen to ‘trust the experts’. I would amend this to listen to the experts, which is a different thing. Inevitably, and probably necessarily, things get distilled down to very simple messages. Vaccines good. Cholesterol bad. And so on.

The success of the pharmaceutical approach has led us into a kind of Pharmageddon. We’ve largely sleepwalked into a world where there’s a pill for everything, and if we don’t walk out of the doctor’s office with that prescription in hand we feel like we’ve been short-changed, we haven’t had our money’s worth.

But, like with any complex thing, scratch away the veneer of the simple messaging and you’ll find a pitted and scarred landscape beneath. I’d fully accepted the message that vaccines are super-double-plus-good modern medical miracles. Imagine my surprise when I learned, as a result of looking deeper into the covid vaccines, that vaccine ‘effectiveness’ is measured solely against disease prevention. Obviously, it should be measured against that. But it shouldn’t be the only thing it’s measured against. The effectiveness of other drugs is also measured against things like overall morbidity. But not vaccines. I had one of those “you what?” moments when I learned that.

The same thing happened when I learned that the usual treatment for type II diabetes is to give medication that increases the production of insulin. The problem, as I understand it, with type II diabetes isn’t that the body has stopped producing insulin, or that it isn’t producing ‘enough’, it’s that the body has stopped responding as well to the insulin that’s produced.

It’s a bit like an alcoholic going to the doctor and saying that he no longer gets drunk on one bottle of whiskey. The doctor wisely nods his confident head and prescribes two bottles of whiskey as the solution.

That we really don’t understand things properly at all when it comes to vaccines and immunity is clear from the work of Professor Christine Stabell Benn which I covered in a previous article. Her work has demonstrated that infant vaccination with live (attenuated) polio virus yields a positive benefit on overall morbidity even when there’s no polio about. It’s so abundantly clear that there’s so very much more going on than just “antibodies”.

But covid vaccines gooderer and betterer because, antibodies. Tons of them. Enough antibodies to drown a frigging battleship. This, allegedly, is a good thing - despite the ‘vaccine’ induced immune response being very different from the (natural) disease-acquired immune response. More antibodies = super-double-plus-gooderer immunity, or so the simple messaging goes.

If this vaccine induced response was so superior, then this would have been the mechanism that evolution provided us with. But it didn’t. It’s very telling that the most successful vaccines we have (the vaccines based on live attenuated viruses) are those that most closely mimic natural infection.

I know next to diddly squat about immunology and vaccinology, but this is a “no shit, Sherlock” moment, if ever there was one.

Lord only knows what the Godawful Goo they injected people with during the Covid Jabnarok is mimicking, but as sure as larger more immobile gametes are larger more immobile gametes, it isn’t even close to being ‘natural’.

And we’re surprised that things didn’t go as planned?

The hubris and misplaced confidence has been stark and damaging.

There’s still a rump of people whose minds have essentially been ‘broken’. They’re the ones calling for masks, more boosters, more restrictions. They have placed so much faith in the ‘system’ they cannot accept the fact that their fear is wholly irrational.

They believe covid to be some sort of Armageddon. Lots more people are gradually waking up to the fact that it has largely been a Pharmageddon.

1. This is one of my all-time favourite ‘pop science’ books and well worth a read. It is, not surprisingly, a book about oxygen and covers climate and also how oxygen came to be the stuff of life and how our bodies actually deal with this toxic and reactive, but necessary, substance.

2. Probably not ‘stop’ but certainly disincentivize. If you’re making a boat load of cash from selling a successful and ongoing treatment of symptoms, the last thing you’d want is a simple cheap cure to exist - or for there to be a way to prevent the problem in the first place.

3. He’s understood it well; I have not.