"I am a Scientist and I Must Lie"

An Easily Missed Pants-on-Fire Issue with Visual Science Reporting

Update November 10, 2021: I received messages worrying about not understanding immunology sufficiently to grok this poast. Have no fear frens. You only need a half cup of coffee level of attention span to get this. A little more explanation added.

Claim: Scientists deceive in myriad ways and a top method to get away with it is the visual lie. Massaged statistics can be buried in tables and caused to do a lot of persuasive work, but for some reason, charts slip more comparative lies past more people. Perhaps people are more comfortable relying on their eyes than looking at columns of numbers, perhaps they feel safer because any attempts at deception would be obvious (right?), so much so that they feel like “Nah, they wouldn’t try to pull one over on me like that….would they?” Yes. They would. They do. All the time.

I wrote elements of this in a chatte for some frens who were reviewing the recent Nature article designed to give cover to FDA for mix-n-match-vaxx. The basic premise behind the article, inter alia, was to examine various degrees to which humoral immunity (aka Immunoglobulin, Ig) neutralizes viral variants, preventing actual virus from entering cells.

I will not cover the relative unimportance of freakish levels of Ig in managing the Rona, relative to Cytotoxic T-cell avidity. (Perhaps soon.) Just assume for the moment that if you are TPTB and are writing a propaganda piece for Nature pressurizing details that uninformed journos will rush to tell scared Boomers, you will want to highlight all the awesome immunoglobs they will get for free if they jab a lot. Ig seems to be a basic immunology teaching that Boomers can absorb.

The scientists used the commercial “monoclonal antibodies” (mAbs) made famous by Trump’s 72-hour Rona recovery and by Florida Gov. DeSantis getting them to his elderly, you know, the ones the Current Year tyrants denied to Alabama. There are 2 key flavors: A mix made by Eli Lilly, which is hot garbage at stopping variants (a reasonable conclusion of the paper) and the Regeneron mix product (shown to be superior against all in the mAb head-to-head tests). They also used immune plasma from people who had been double-vaxxed by Pfizer/BioNTech (BNT) and AstraZeneca (AZ, not shown here, but see link). And lastly, they used “convalescent” serum, aka “recovered,” aka “natural immune” patient serum.

Before looking further, let’s briefly cover two terms of art: “Monoclonal” means one mature B-cell (aka plasma cell), produces exactly one model of specifically-targeted immunoglobulin molecule, that can attach itself lock-around-key to exactly one specific area of an antigen or “epitope.” All of the Igs that come from that lab-isolated clone cell are identical proteins. In the body, bazillions of disparate plasma cells make bazillions^2 of Ig molecules that target many epitopes. Since they come from widely varying B-cells that only proliferate if they hit their target, the Ig proteins come from many clones, aka polyclonal. The “monoclonal cocktail” products attempt to basically replicate this “many targets” feature of natural immunity’s polyclonal nature by painstakingly mixing lab monoclonal Igs targeted toward different viral epitopes. Simple.

Now, it should be noted that nattymunes’ sera are polyclonal and therefore the sera are not married to a particular epitope (or just a few epitopes) on the surface of the virus. When polyclonal convalescent sera is in a shootout with mAbs, one might easily expect the polys to neutralize virus somewhat better at the same dilution. OK.

In the paper, variant neutralization is by 1/dilution-factor, so a big number = big medicine; highly concentrated Igs. The chart on the left highest y-axis is 10^6 or 1:1,000,000 dilution. Chart on the right highest is 10^5 or 1:100,000 dilution. Note they use log scaling y-axis which is typical to demonstrate clustering. This is not a critical beef from me, but just keep in mind what you are looking at: a small difference is 10X greater than you would immediately guess from the linear way the brain processes visual information.

These were snipped out of the paper where they were originally stacked in an un-comparable way. To the average citizen, it would seem as though looking horizontally across at the high level of dilution that keeps half the virums out of cells in the BNT/BNT immunized (right chart) is slightly superior to the “Convalescent” or recovered sera. Right? Double-jab is awesome yes?

But their graph is tweaked in a way that begs for this analysis. Let me go ahead and fix that for you with simple same-scaling:

All I did (honest) was toss the 0-1 grey box at the bottom of the right graph and add the 10^6 dilution area on top, then put them on even footing, no stretching. Swear. You can print them out and overlay them to see. Now what do you think of Pfizer’s ability to halt the virums? Probably a little less than when you saw the first image on top, if you are paying attention.

To neutralize the effect of the log-scale visual cluster trick, let’s do simple division. Here are the simple Multiples of Inhibition using Convalescent sera vs. 2x-jabbed Pfizer/BioNTech

• Against variant B.1 convalescent sera is >4x more active (eg. 1,580/380)

• Against variant A.30 convalescent sera is >4x more active

• Against variant B.1.525 convalescent sera is ~4x more active

• Against variant B.1.351 convalescent sera is ~2x more active

Now, it may be that the grey patch at the bottom of the graph (the 0-1 area) for the vaxxed tests had to be there just to make a home for the AZ product that had virtually zero measurable effect. But note that this can tell you something interesting about the nattymunes: In ALL Convalescent cases there was NO zero effect, and in ALL cases nattymune sera was superior to the mAb cocktails. TBF, go back and see “polyclonal” discussion above to see how this might be expected.

Be advised: Scientists are in the business of lying to you in every little chickenshit or Big Lie way they can. Catch every one of these deceits and expose them where you find them. Until skepticism within the scientific community returns, it will be necessary for citizens to remain much more skeptical of scientists in general.