Why is herd immunity controversial?

Why even pose the question? Logic tells us herd immunity is simply the biological mechanism that ends pandemics, and there is no other. It comes about through exposure to the virus, and/or a "viral mimic" in the form of a vaccine. If one is never exposed to any form of the virus, biologic or artificial, there can be no immunity, individual or herd.

I've read that vaccines are between 40-60% effective. Not sure how we arrive at that number, presumably in isolated studies where no opportunity to be exposed to the biologic form of virus confounds results. If the 40-60% number is correct, consider that exposure to active viruses may be more effective than exposure to artificial viral mimics. Otherwise it's very unlikely our species sapiens would have survived our 120,000 years on the planet preceding vaccines, a concept that is 200 years old.

Have we been blinded by science with the idea only vaccines are effective? Consider also that vaccines take time to develop, and by the time of their arrival herd immunity is already well along it's path.

And yet all credit goes to vaccines. Hubris?

I'm reminded of the Thomas Dolby song "She Blinded Me With Science".

I have no objection to vaccines that are safe and effective, but I have come to be concerned about the corrosive effect of outsized profits on the vetting process.

The obsession with cases also blurs the issue. Epidemiologists focus on mortality because as the virus "consumes it's resources" (the immunologically naive), two things happen: one, it depletes resources, and two, it mutates and virulence decreases. Both factors cause mortality rates to decline as herd immunity increases.

Of course an overall combined benefit is possible to a double exposure to both live virus and viral mimics. But that is mostly beside the point I'm trying to make.

One pandemic we humans are increasingly infected with is hubris, which is correlated to and increases with industrialization and technology. We have asserted a great deal of control over nature, but at the cost of environmental destruction. There is a belief more technology, the original problem vis a vis ecological destruction, will be the answer. But technology is simply not possible without resource consumption. Collectively we humans have a difficult time accepting that proposition. Every new technology is going to be "the answer". It's a hubristic delusion that takes us further into the current rapid decline of biodiversity, the seventh mass extinction.

Certain members of the health science community take a zero tolerance position, where any number of cases and deaths from the virus are unacceptable. This strikes me as naive, hubristic, and ultimately and ironically, more destructive than the focused protection perspective.

Some also have the idea as an indication of the success of lockdowns to this point only 20% of populations have been exposed to the virus. And going to a focused protection approach will result in a massively higher total mortality. This also strikes me as a naive belief that "waiting for the vaccine to save us" is the answer to everything. It's my impression most experts feel the numbers of the exposed is closer to 60% at this point. Let's also remember that most individuals exposed have either no, or minimal, symptoms.

If that's the case herd immunity to covid is pretty much here already, and the fact global all cause mortality rates have mostly dropped back to normal levels supports that view. This does not mean however care and caution with social distancing is no longer warranted, we first need to see more prolonged all cause mortality rates back to normal levels.

These two perspectives, an overactive belief in science as the answer to everything, versus the less hubristic recognition that nature still runs the show, seems to me to be at the root of the social hysteria we are currently enduring. And if I may note, most of the strife is generated by the overactive belief brigade.

Isn't that usually the case?

We are of the earth and we return to the earth. The human who's biology is not absorbed back into the earth has yet to happen. That would be, I suppose, the first astronaut to slough this mortal coil above the atmosphere, way off into the cosmos somewhere. There must be some innate comfort to death on the earth we don't think of very often. Mother Earth is generous in her birthing of us and grateful in her receiving of us when our time somes. And we are grateful there is life at all in the cosmos, here, on Earth.

Jordan Peterson at his most succinct and brilliant

 If you know anything at all about Jordan Peterson you will probably know he is considered to be quite controversial. I have to admit I don't understand this point of view at all, I find him to be self-evidently grounded, common sensical, and brilliant. Can we also call him an original thinker? I think so, if only in the sense he arrives at eternal truths of what it is to be human more quickly and fluidly than other original thinkers who've come before him.

A Topical Question: Where does Hubris Come From?

I think we all know what hubris is, dictionary.com defines hubris as excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance. The Wikipedia page says hubris describes a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence. And in ancient Greek hubris referred to actions that violated natural order, or which shamed and humiliated the victim, sometimes for the pleasure or gratification of the abuser.

We shouldn't have to work too hard to think of an excessively hubristic individual that occupies the world stage at the moment. But the point of this post is not the extremes of hubris (one might say intractable, or pathological hubris), but rather more common everyday examples of hubris, and where hubris comes from in general. And yes, I have a personal interest in this as a result of some of my experiences with my own hubris.

The short answer is hubris is an example of something called egocentric bias. And perhaps the most interesting and complex thing about bias is it's typically completely unconscious. And we all have various forms of unconscious bias, it's simply part of being human: where there is an unconscious mind there is also bias.

It seems to me there are fairly widespread misconceptions about the unconscious part of our human mind. And the most basic of these is that the unconscious is accessible. And of course it is to some extent, as in dreams and myths. Perhaps Joseph Campbell, the well known professor famous for his work on mythology, would have said The Power of Myth is in its ability for us to better understand our unconscious human mind.

So perhaps it's accurate to say the unconscious is partially accessible. Accessibility is, after all, the point of psychoanalytic and other therapies that intend to reach into the unconscious mind and find and resolve those "stuck parts" that repeat counterproductive thoughts and behaviors over and over in never ending loops. These therapies pursued with diligence can be successful to varying degree, which itself speaks to the relative inaccessibility of our unconscious mind.

The central idea that came out of the Age of Enlightenment was that the capacity for reasoning bestows on us the power to control our destiny. This is, of course, a very attractive idea that continues to predominate the Western perspective. But more recently brain science is discovering the degree to which Freud was correct in his most basic idea that our behaviors are governed mostly by the unconscious. A wonderful book that delves into the implications of this is "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than EQ" by Daniel Goleman.

So then where does hubris come from? We can all have it, and probably have to varying degrees and times in our lives. There is a somewhat surprising answer, it is luck, combined with the unconscious.

I came across a great Youtube channel recently named Veritasium (a made up word) where the author covered the degree to which luck plays in success and hubris very nicely. The title of this video: Is Success Luck or Hard Work? It's 12 minutes, and worth every one of them:

For those who would like to learn more about unconscious bias I'd also like to recommend a book on this fascinating topic, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgements in Our Daily Lives, by Howard Ross, who is probably as expert on this as anyone.

Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

Vaccines are wonderful? Or toxic? Which is it?

The following is a rebuttal I made to a very good friend who is 100% in the vaccines are wonderful camp. And let me say at the outset I am not 100% in the vaccines are crap camp, but I am skeptical for reasons that will become apparent if you have the patience to follow this post fully to completion.

My friend said:

That notion about getting autism from vaccination has been proven false after thorough investigation!!!!

And I responded:

Proven false after investigation by the industries that profit from it. The models under test were heavily contaminated with bias. If you watch the entire hour and a half interview of Dale Bigtree (link below) you will see the allegation there were no placebo controlled trials, and understand the importance of that in studies on health.


Do you think the autism epidemic is a mystery? It's only a mystery in that we do not have studies that track down the exact mechanism...because the industry that profits is powerful enough to block those unbiased studies from taking place. IMHO we know what the general mechanism is, it is the ingress of toxins into the body that overwhelm the body's detoxification capacity.


Let me unpack that a little bit. First this is the mechanism that causes all the epidemic increases in so called post industrial diseases from alzheimer's to diabetes. These diseases collectively kill about 90% of the developed world population prematurely. Heart disease alone kills more people than any other post industrial disease, and there are dozens of epidemic post industrial diseases, I'm not going to list them all here. The mechanism of all these diseases is overload of the body's innate capacity to remove toxins, which is the basis of the body's self-healing capacity.


Here is the critical point - modern pharmaceutical medicine gets this completely wrong. It adds more toxins to the mix. These toxins can serve to mask symptoms at best, but they also degrade health overall. Pharmacology is, and continues to be, blind to this problem because of profit bias and what I'm going to call (shorthand) "magic thinking" bias, both of which operate completely on the unconscious level. To understand the depth of this problem it's important to realize the "unconscious" part of this equation is the root of the problem. The entire point of science is to do an "end around" unconscious bias with the placebo controlled method! But the design of models under test are contaminated with unconscious bias at the outset, eliminating or degrading effective placebo controls, and skewing results in favor of pre-existing bias.


Sorry to "yell", but this is the critical point - NO PLACEBO CONTROLLED STUDIES OF CAUSAL MECHANISMS FOR AUTISM have been performed. This problem "infects" pharmacological "science" (using the word loosely) in general, but is particularly acute in the case of autism. Where there is profit there is unconscious bias, period. All of us mere humans are subject to this bias.


The "disease reversal diet", and I'm not talking vegan here, I'm talking whole foods in general, works because of two things in particular: first it removes toxic post industrial foods from the diet and replaces them with foods we are evolutionarily adapted to - which are exclusively whole foods. There were no toxic brew food lab concoctions and concentrations 100,000 years ago. Paleos and a certain subset of vegans understand the criticality of this idea. In addition to food lab chemical garbage consider all the toxins we regularly consume that are considered "OK", or even better than ok. Coffee. Alcohol. Refined carbohydrates (pure sugars). Refined fats (pure oils). Disease reversal diets work to the extent ALL toxins are removed from the diet. It does not have to be perfect, it only has to be "good enough" to get back to the point the body's innate capacity for 24/7/365/birth-to-death detoxification is no longer overwhelmed.


Physical activity accelerates detoxification, it is not enough on it's own. Fasting, done properly, accelerates detoxification, and is enough on it's own to "reset the body", but if not followed with a "good enough" whole foods diet will fail in the long run.


A complete lifestyle change is required, and that is difficult for three reasons. 1) No "authority" is telling us we should do this. It's amazing but true, most humans have a need to believe their government "has their back". But governments are rarely a good source of health information. 2) "The food doesn't taste good." There is a brilliant little book "The Pleasure Trap" that explains this very "sticky" problem in detail, IMHO one is not fully "armed" without this information. Very basically we become addicted to toxins because we do not understand the unconscious instinctual complex sufficiently to deal with the biological forces working to attract us to overstimulation. The food doesn't taste good because we are addicted to overstimulation. 3) We are herd animals, we only feel safe in numbers. There are valid reasons for that but they quickly become counterproductive, and we have difficulty with discrimination on that point. We only want to eat what everyone else is eating and everyone else is not eating real food.


Get yourself an extremely healthy subculture, it's the only hope.

Post industrial technology is giving us choices that did not exist 100,000 years ago. Our instincts, like the rest of our biology, evolved in that era. In an era where resources were scarce, nature "controlled" what we put in our bodies. Paradoxically however, technology also gives us the opportunity for the longest "healthy life spans" in human history, but we are not taking advantage of it. Generally we do not even appreciate that this is possible, it's not "a thing". These technological advantages boil down basically to protect us from "exposure to the elements". Combine that advantage with the advantage of the very best diet and lifestyle choices and we might see a boom in centenarian populations. Instead everyone is dying prematurely from post industrial conditions.

(I'm going to add one thing here I did not think to say in my original rebuttal to my friend. I don't want to give the impression that I naively think all cases of autism are reversible with dietary changes. There are definitely cases where toxicity is at such a concentration it becomes irreversible. This rises to the level where "poisoning" is the more appropriate descriptor, and of course goes beyond autism.)


So, if you are still with me and you'd like to continue, please watch the entire Del Bigtree interview with an open mind, otherwise I've said my piece. Here is the link again

https://youtu.be/FX95m5kXMBU?t=1

Women Deserve to Know

Women deserve to know there is a much higher risk of breast cancer with consumption of dairy products. To underline the point The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is suing the FDA to put health warnings for breast cancer risk on cheese and dairy.

This may sound absurd to our ears today, but consider a situation that may end up being very similar to this one: the warning label for lung cancer risk went on cigarettes in 1964, but as early as 1957 the link between smoking and lung cancer had become scientifically incontrovertible:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/02/thisweekssciencequestions.cancer

The video below should begin at 4:10, where the cheese and breast cancer link is discussed:

https://youtu.be/2XEox82C4x0?t=250

Undoing the Consequence of Dietary Excess

 Various approaches to fasting seems to be the topic du jour from cancer researchers to paleo/keto dieters. Here's an excellent conversation between Rich Roll (Author of "Finding Ultra" and podcaster par excellence) and Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the founder of True North Health Center, longest running fasting clinic in the US.

I personally did a 12 day water fast with Dr. Doug Graham at a retreat center north of Seattle. Doug teaches the principles of fasting while you are in a water only fast, experiencing it first hand. The benefit of this kind of personal experience and education is profoundly life changing.

https://youtu.be/yaWVflQolmM

Making the vegan diet work

 Vegetables don't have enough calories to be the primary food source, exception being the tubers. Let's say you wanted to be a "high raw" vegan (which means low levels of cooked starches), to get enough calories you really only have two choices to get enough calories, fruit or fat.

To get enough vitamins and minerals you also have to get enough calories. Vegans who don't understand this will fail on the diet sooner or later. And supplements are generally ineffective in this regard, isolated nutrients do not have the same power as the "nested nutrients" in whole foods.

But fats are lower in vitamins and minerals than whole food plants. Pure fat (oils) have nil levels of micronutrient content.

And eating too many fats makes one insulin resistant, or in other words carbohydrate intolerant.

Carb intolerance means plant food intolerance, because plants are mostly carbs.

Since I am a high carb vegan I keep my fats low and fruits are my staple food source. Starchy foods will work also, and I do eat them, but fruits are higher in micronutrient content and easier to digest. Lower energy load in digestion equals higher "available energy" per calorie. Similar to higher miles per gallon efficiency in cars. The net benefit is generally higher levels of available energy.

The story of life from childhood to elderhood is decreasing energy and (hopefully) increasing wisdom. Higher available energy as we age is a good thing.

My blood sugar is at low normal levels and stable. If I begin to consume higher levels of fat my blood sugar levels will increase and destabilize, and I'll begin to feel bad and gain weight. That is not good, so I don't do it...

Instead I "surround" my staple fruit consumption with a wide variety of other plant foods, using the basic prescription for the whole food plant based diet, which is fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and moderate consumption of nuts and seeds (the healthy fats).

Also: I have kicked refined products to the curb, reducing consumption of refined carbs (pure sugar) and refined fats (pure oil) to nil. And I avoid salt as it desensitizes the taste buds and reduces the innate deliciousness of healthy whole plant foods.

Pure sugar, pure fat, and salt are all toxic. Most people do not realize it can take as little as two tablespoons of salt in a single dose to kill a healthy adult human. But salt water sailors know this.

The key to robust health is to reduce toxic input to every extent possible, and increase nutrient dense energy efficient whole food intake.

BTW, pharmaceutical medications are toxic. One of the great benefits to the healthy whole foods plant based approach is it allows us to greatly reduce, and typically eliminate, toxic medications. That combined with "natural" bodyweight and increased energy is about as good as it gets.