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Why mRNA failed: Groupthink, not science
by Winston Smith, 6 December 2021
"If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of an independent investigator driven discovery, you'd have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine."
– Dr. Samuel Broder, National Cancer Institute, 1997
Omicron is spreading rapidly across the globe, and SARS-CoV-2 has now mutated in a way that this new variant appears to escape previous immunities. Antibody dependent enhancement, a phenomenon predicted by numerous eminent virologists and well‑known to vaccine researchers, is now looking like a real probability; as is the likelihood that current 'leaky' vaccines increase the prevalence and fitness of new SARS‑CoV‑2 variants. Like all prior mRNA vaccine attempts – influenza, Zika, rabies, the common cold(s), CMV, RSV, SARS-CoV-1, etc – the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine experiment has similarly ended in failure.
What went wrong?
Groupthink describes a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision‑making outcome. The term was coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte Jr, derived from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty‑Four, but the phenomenon was perhaps best described by psychologist Irving Janis in his 1971 paper explaining the concept.
The problem is that when powerful psychological pressures arise and members of a group work closely together to deal with a crisis which puts its members under intense stress (such as the COVID‑19 pandemic) the advantages of having decisions made by groups are lost.
The main principle of groupthink is this: "The more amiability and espirit de corps there is among members of a policy‑making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups."
"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
– George Orwell
Symptoms of groupthink:
In his studies, Janis identified eight "symptoms" of groupthink:
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Invulnerability. Most or all vaccinated persons share an illusion of invulnerability that provides some reassurance about the obvious dangers of COVID‑19. This has led vaccine adherents to become over‑optimistic about mRNA vaccines and willing to take extraordinary risks, like injecting these novel substances into whole populations including children, despite their unknown long‑term effects. Like the ingroup around Admiral H. E. Kimmel just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the Fauci team were blind to the dangers of the vaccine campaign and ignored them, despite repeated warnings of what might occur.
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Rationale. Vaccine adherents collectively construct rationalizations in order to ignore warnings or case data which, taken seriously, might cause individuals to question or reconsider the vaccine program. Similar to the ingroup around Lyndon B Johnson which agreed that "another four weeks of bombing" would spur peace talks with Vietnam, the Fauci team has stated "around round of boosters" is the answer, despite early indications that current vaccines provide no protection against the Omicron variant, or indeed exacerbates Delta cases as was seen in the Humetrix/Project Salus DoD report. In what Townsend Hoopes called "instant rationalization", members of the group select scraps of evidence from news reports or, if necessary, invent "plausible forecasts" about "new vaccines in 100 days" that have no basis in evidence.
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Morality. Vaccine adherents believe unquestioningly in the inherent morality of the vaccination program, this belief inclines them to ignore the ethical, moral and epidemiological consequences of mRNA vaccination campaigns, especially mandatory ones. Evidence of this symptom is usually negative – the things that are left unsaid. Similar to the ingroup around Kennedy during the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 which did not hear the objections/misgivings of two senior high commanders, the Fauci team failed to consider the possible consequences (intended and unintended) of the vaccine campaign – most likely as part of some rigid bureaucratic process and/or because they felt morally justified in their adherence to the campaign given its noble intentions.
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Stereotypes. Vaccine adherents hold stereotypical views of "anti‑vaxxers" – their indifference to human life renders them so evil that genuine attempts at negotiating differences with them are unwarranted; or else their ignorance in questioning the campaign means they are too stupid to be dealt with effectively. Similar to Kennedy's groupthinkers who incorrectly viewed the armed forces in Cuba as ineffectual and unable to repel an invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the Fauci team's stereotypical views of "anti‑science cranks" (eminent doctors) like Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr. Byram Bridle, Dr. Julie Ponesse, Dr. James Doidge, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Judy Mikovits and Dr. Ron Paul meant their legitimate warnings were not considered, and their dissenting opinions dismissed as "misinformation". This symptom was compounded by the fact that, prior to the COVID‑19 pandemic, most "anti‑vaxxers" who opposed long‑established vaccines like MMR were in fact crackpots.
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Pressure. Vaccine adherents apply direct pressure to any individual who momentarily expresses doubts about the group's shared illusions, or questions the validity of the arguments supporting the vaccine program. This gambit reinforces the concurrence‑seeking norm that loyal members are expected to maintain. Like LBJ in the escalation of the Vietnam bombing campaign used subtle social pressures to "domesticate" dissenters within the White House, similar pressures were placed on many individuals across society who, while made to feel at home, were not permitted to share their opposition to the vaccine campaign openly; or could share their views provided they did not challenge any of the fundamental assumptions of the campaign e.g. that mRNA vaccines be effective in limiting the effects of the disease on mankind in the long‑term.
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Self‑censorship. Victims of groupthink avoid deviating from what appears to be group consensus ‑ they keep silent about their misgivings, even minimizing to themselves the importance of their doubts. Like many who had misgivings about the vaccination campaign but went along without objection, many vaccine adherents might in the coming years share similar thoughts to Arthur Schlesinger, "In the months after the Bay of Pigs I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room. I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the discussion."
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Unanimity – Victims of groupthink share an illusion of unanimity within the group concerning almost all judgment expressed by members who speak in favour of the majority view. This symptom results partly from the preceding one, augmented by the false assumption that any individual who maintains their silence is in full accord with what the others are saying. When a group of people who respect each other's opinions arrive at a unanimous view, each member is likely to feel that the belief must be true ‑ however this reliance on consensual validation within the group tends to replace individual critical thinking and reality testing. Like the cabinet members contemplating the invasion of Cuba, it is painful for members to confront disagreements within their group. Once the sense of unanimity is shattered, the members can no longer feel complacently confident – each man must face the annoying realization that there are troublesome uncertainties and he must diligently seek out the best information he can. To avoid such an unpleasant reality, members of the group often become inclined, without quite realizing it, to prevent latent disagreements from surfacing – thus group members support each other at the expense of fully exploring divergencies that might reveal unsettled issues.
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Mindguards – Some vaccine adherents such as Facebook, Google and mainstream media outlets appoint themselves "mindguards" to protect the movement and fellow cult members from adverse information that might break the complacency they shared about the effectiveness of past decisions, by censoring contradictory information or manipulating search results that might contradict this shared illusion. Similar to Dean Rusk in the Cabinet room before Kennedy gave the Cuban invasion the go‑ahead, members of the Fauci team likely failed to transmit the strong objections of outsiders to the group, who may then have reconsidered or chosen to seek further information about the potential ramifications of the mRNA vaccine campaign.
"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."
– Coco Chanel
"The best books… are those that tell you what you know already."
– George Orwell
Why does groupthink occur?
Think about the last time you were part of a group, perhaps during a work or school project. Imagine that someone proposes an idea that you think is quite poor. However, everyone else in the group agrees with the person who suggested the idea, and the group seems set on pursuing that course of action. Do you voice your dissent or do you just go along with the majority opinion?
The term 'groupthink' describes the mode of thinking people engage in when concurrence‑seeking becomes so dominant it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. People engage in groupthink when they fear that their objections might disrupt the harmony of the group or suspect that their ideas might cause other members to reject them. In a global pandemic and a fight against a novel pathogen, these fears are understandably magnified.
"Groupthink being a coinage – and, admittedly, a loaded one – a working definition is in order. We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity – it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a "rationalized" conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well."
– William H. Whyte Jr
Groupthink is common in situations involving:
· Strong group identity: Where group members are very similar to one another, such as sharing a common nationality and a common fight against a deadly pathogen, they tend to perceive their group as correct or superior, while expressing disdain or disapproval toward those who would question the movement who are deemed "incorrect" or "inferior".
· Leader influences: Groupthink is also more likely to take place when a powerful and charismatic leader commands the group. This factor was absent in the present case.
· Low knowledge: When people lack personal knowledge of something or feel that other members of the group are more qualified, such as in the case of mRNA vaccines and a novel coronavirus, they are more likely to engage in groupthink.
· Stress: Where the group is placed under extreme stress or where moral dilemmas exist, such as lockdowns and life‑and‑death decisions, this also increases the occurrence of groupthink.
"For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same."
– Hannah Arendt
"The first lesson every child of Athena learned: Mom was the best at everything, and you should never, ever suggest otherwise."
– Rick Riordan
Problematic consequences of groupthink:
· Blindness to potentially negative outcomes, in this case VADE and proliferation of new variants as a result of vaccines.
· Failure to listen to people with dissenting opinions, such as the aforementioned Dr. Robert Malone and other reputable virologists whose views should have been aired and discussed.
· Lack of creativity, such as utilizing other methods for vaccination, delaying rollouts to examine effectiveness, or exploring the use of vaccines developed overseas.
· Lack of preparation to deal with negative outcomes, such as new variants that might crop up from time to time and escape vaccine‑induced immunity.
· Ignoring important information, like previous examples of VADE in other failed mRNA vaccine trials including those for dengue fever, HIV, RSV, SARS‑CoV‑1, and other coronaviruses.
· Inability to see other solutions, like delaying the rollout to examine the long‑term population‑level effects of the vaccine program.
· Not looking for things that might not yet be known to the group, like the serious consequences of prior vaccine trials or the effect of the vaccine campaign on the prevalence and fitness of future COVID variants.
· Obedience to authority without question, such as entire populations accepting administration of questionable compounds into their bodies whose long‑term effects are largely unknown.
· Overconfidence in decisions, such as the refusal to reconsider or examine the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccine campaign, despite evidence indicating its lack of effectiveness at preventing spread of the Delta and Omicron variants.
· Resistance to new information or ideas, such as data which contradicts the assumption that the vaccine rollout campaign would prevent hospitalization and death over the long term, taking into account new variants.
Why did mRNA vaccines fail?
"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
– Sir Winston Churchill
"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
– Edgar Allen Poe
"An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
– Orlando Battista
The author invites you to read the following excerpts:
Antibody‑dependent enhancement (ADE), sometimes less precisely called immune enhancement or disease enhancement, is a phenomenon in which binding of a virus to suboptimal antibodies enhances its entry into host cells, followed by its replication. The suboptimal antibodies can result from natural infection or from vaccination. ADE may cause enhanced respiratory disease and acute lung injury after respiratory virus infection (ERD) with symptoms of monocytic infiltration and an excess of eosinophils in respiratory tract. ADE along with type 2 T helper cell‑dependent mechanisms may contribute to a development of the vaccine associated disease enhancement (VADE), which is not limited to respiratory disease. Some vaccine candidates that targeted coronaviruses, RSV virus and Dengue virus elicited VADE, and were terminated from further development or became approved for use only for patients who had those viruses before.
Original antigenic sin, also known as antigenic imprinting or the Hoskins effect, refers to the propensity of the body's immune system to preferentially utilize immunological memory based on a previous infection when a second slightly different version of that foreign pathogen (e.g. a virus or bacterium) is encountered. This leaves the immune system "trapped" by the first response it has made to each antigen, and unable to mount potentially more effective responses during subsequent infections. Antibodies or T‑cells induced during infections with the first variant of the pathogen are subject to a form of original antigenic sin, termed repertoire freeze.
Original antigenic sin is of particular importance in the application of vaccines. In dengue fever, the effect of original antigenic sin has important implications for vaccine development. Once a response against a dengue virus serotype has been established, it is unlikely that vaccination against a second will be effective, implying that balanced responses against all four virus serotypes have to be established with the first vaccine dose.
Between primary and secondary infections, or following vaccination, a virus may undergo antigenic drift, in which the viral surface proteins (the epitopes) are altered through natural mutation, allowing the virus to escape the immune system.
The Dengvaxia controversy occurred in the Philippines when the dengue vaccine Dengvaxia was found to increase the risk of disease severity for some people who had received it. A vaccination program run by the Philippine Department of Health (DOH) administered Sanofi Pasteur's Dengvaxia to schoolchildren. The program was stopped when Sanofi Pasteur advised the government that the vaccine could put previously uninfected people at a somewhat higher risk of a severe case of dengue fever through antibody‑dependent enhancement. A political controversy erupted over whether the program was run with sufficient care and who should be held responsible for the alleged harm to the vaccinated children.
Approximately 800,000 schoolchildren received the Dengvaxia vaccine and benefit from the protection it grants against dengue fever. However around 10% of those 800,000 had not had dengue fever before and therefore are at risk of severe infection because of the vaccine. While concerns about vaccine safety are usually irrational, in the case of Dengvaxia there was a basis in evidence. Many parents of children who died blamed the vaccine. Most of the deaths were caused by internal bleeding in the heart, lungs and brain, which are symptoms of hemorrhagic dengue.
Nearly all children who received Dengvaxia produced neutralizing antibodies against all four serotype of dengue virus – so why weren’t they protected from serious disease? It seems likely that antibodies do not provide protection against ADE – rather, CD8+ T cells protect against severe dengue virus disease.
COVID‑19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID‑19 disease via antibody‑dependent enhancement (ADE).
The ongoing evolution of this virus generates mutations that can reduce vaccine‑induced immunity. Although there is no evidence to [July 2021] of an ongoing ‘antigenic drift’, such as that observed with influenza virus, mutations affecting transmission and disease severity can occur, and vaccine‑induced immune selection pressure at a population level may accelerate the development of escape mutants as has been suggested for other pathogens.
This author, not being an expert, can only speculate on what scientific process caused 60 gain‑of‑function mutations in the SARS‑CoV‑2 betacoronavirus to occur all in one shot which closely resemble the HCoV‑229E alphacoronavirus and allowed Omicron to evade previous vaccines and immunities. Similarly the author does not intend to explore the reports of VADE in omicron‑infected persons due to weak immune response generated by alpha‑based vaccines; nor the possibility that 'leaky' vaccines are accelerating the evolution of new variants; nor the extent of reported adverse events which is only now coming to light.
The author merely notes that, in the haste to roll out the vaccination campaign at "warp speed", consideration of these serious potential ramifications appears to have fallen by the wayside – as did three fundamental questions: "Will this vaccine reduce the human and economic cost of the virus over the long‑term?" "Do we know how long vaccine-induced immunity will last?" And, perhaps most importantly,"Will a second mRNA vaccination for another variant even work?"
"As someone who develops vaccines, I can tell you that it is difficult to make a vaccine that will perform as poorly as the current COVID‑19 vaccines."
– Dr. Byram Bridle, PhD
"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
– Leo Tolstoy
"When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads."
– Dr. Ron Paul
Was this intentional?