Vaccines don’t work as well in old people. Some will still die despite protection from vaccines.

It is now looking like vaccines are less effective in people 50 or older, who make up almost all coronavirus deaths.  Vaccine effectiveness against death is more like 79% than 100%.  That aspect of vaccines will not live up to its hype.  Dying from COVID-19 will remain a problem.

I don’t know how this will impact the economy and how people will behave.  The coronavirus has been heavily politicized so it is hard to predict how the political winds will shift.  A safer prediction is to bet on COVID treatments doing well.  It looks like (A) most of humanity will get the virus and (B) old people are still at risk of dying.  This is the right environment for a massive COVID treatment market.

The Fraud Industry part 3: Money laundering

While money laundering is illegal, it often leaves behind a paper trail behind that investors can uncover.

Also, it has led to interesting scenes from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

The Fraud Industry part 2: Reverse mergers are scams + shady transfer agents

The SEC has a bunch of rules that make it more annoying to run a pump and dump.  This has spawned a mini-industry of professionals who help pump and dumpers exploit the loopholes in those rules targeting reverse mergers, which is the most common vehicle for pump and dumps to be listed.

The sketchy transfer agents will publish guides on their website about what they are and aren’t willing to do when it comes to their clients getting around regulations such as Rule 144.

The Fraud Industry part 1: It takes a village to raise a fraud

Pump and dump is its own industry with industry conferences and specialists who provide helper services like shady legal advice, illegal transfer agent services, stock promotion, etc.  This industry operates a lot like other industries, except some effort is made to conceal their activities.

In this series of blog posts, I will go over how the industry works and how you can figure out the interconnections between industry players.  Industry insiders consistently use the same service providers: lawyers, accountants, investment banks, brokers, stock promoters, investor relations firms, and transfer agents.  All of that leaves behind a footprint that you can use to sleuth out connections behind the industry’s output.

This series will go over:

• How to quickly spot a pump and dump.
• How you can bet against these stocks and why you shouldn’t do it.

Most of humanity will catch the coronavirus + surgical masks won’t help

Many people have developed preferred positions on the coronavirus and will stick to those positions regardless of evidence.  I accept that I will probably alienate those people.  However, we don’t need to hurt ourselves with crazy views on the coronavirus.  We don’t have to become overly obsessed with partisan politics, worshipping science as a religion, or trying to look smart by saying that we oppose fear porn.  It’s important that we talk about the coronavirus and start getting to the truth.

• Surgical masks have very little or no effect on becoming infected.  A lot of people will not want to hear it but that is what the evidence is saying.
• Health authorities know very little about what works because very little research is being performed (unless that research involves vaccines or therapeutics).
• mRNA vaccines will not end the pandemic.
• We have effective tools against the coronavirus.  However, for political reasons, many countries will not adopt all of those tools.
• We are probably going to have to live with the coronavirus.

I think that the future will be… different… rather than bleak.  Vaccines and advances in early treatment might allow society to operate with fewer (or even zero) social restrictions.  However, the virus will be a part of our lives and change how we behave.  Work-from-home, online shopping instead of in-person shopping, not travelling internationally, etc. will likely stick around at lower levels.

Ivermectin will be huge in the fight against COVID

I told you about aerosol transmission roughly a year before the WHO and the CDC stopped suppressing that truth and told you about it.  Now I’m going to tell you about ivermectin.  Some parts of the world are currently using ivermectin to:

1. Prevent COVID-19.  Taken regularly, the drug reduces the chance of getting infected by roughly 79%.  However, there isn’t a lot of great data at the moment.
2. Treat COVID-19.  The drug reduces the chance of dying by roughly 62%.

Currently, there is a huge political war against using ivermectin that will greatly delay its adoption around the world.  It is what it is.  The politics surrounding those battles are actually reasons to be bullish about publicly-traded pharma companies making COVID-19 treatments and vaccines.  The current system is corrupt, supports the profitability of the pharma industry, and has bamboozled the public into wrongly assuming that COVID-19 will magically go away.  Investors may be massively underestimating the growth of vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments.

Ultimately, ivermectin is good news for humanity.  We have a proven, highly effective drug that will allow societies to operate with fewer social restrictions than what we’ve seen so far.  I don’t think the coronavirus pandemic will turn into a coronapocalypse because the world will slowly and eventually figure things out.

Scientists expect the coronavirus to evolve more resistance against vaccines

Scientists have been studying the evolution of SARS-Cov-2 through experiments on cell cultures.  In a laboratory setting, the virus quickly evolves resistance to antibodies when challenged by them.  A mainstream view among evolutionary scientists is that the coronavirus variants will develop even more vaccine resistance than what currently exists.  However, the theoretical work may not necessarily translate to the real world because there are some limitations to the science.

Key points:

1. We should be realistic about what science can and can’t tell us.  We don’t have great science that will help us confidently predict the outcome of the pandemic.  The optimism about a return to normal life is risky.
2. One possible outcome is that more vaccine resistance emerges; humanity will likely be able to fight this with vaccine updates and more frequent vaccination.  Between vaccines and improvements in other interventions, the deadliness and transmissibility of the disease should be significantly lower going forward.  However, life won’t fully return to normal.

Historically, the best vaccines have taken years to eliminate the problem

The world’s most successful vaccine has been against smallpox, which is the only human disease that has been eradicated by a vaccine.  This process took several decades (!!!).  Because the multi-decade roll-out of vaccines is unlikely to be repeated today, we can skip to the next example.

See Out World in Data for some statistics.

The measles vaccine was first available in the USA in 1963.  It took roughly four years for the rate of measles to plummet.

See Our World in Data for some historical figures.

Polio is a similar story for the United States.

See Our World in Data for some historical figures.  (Chart.)

Currently, it is unclear if the mRNA vaccines will ultimately eliminate the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in developed countries.  Supposing that it does, the process would likely take years.

There are signs that the coronavirus won’t be solved with vaccines

While the mRNA vaccines are a miracle, it is starting to look like the vaccines are only partially effective against new mutated versions of the coronavirus that are emerging.  Despite high rates of vaccinations (with non-mRNA vaccines) in Seychelles, authorities are implementing social restrictions because coronavirus infections are growing among vaccinated citizens.

It is possible that countries may see better results with mRNA vaccines since those vaccines are more effective.  However, the United Kingdom is a country with high rates of mRNA vaccinations.  Authorities there have labelled the Indian “double mutant” b.1.617.2 variant as a ‘variant of concern’ because it is rapidly spreading despite vaccination.

While there is a possibility that multiple vaccines will eradicate the coronavirus, the more likely outcome is that new vaccine-resistant strains will emerge.  Vaccines will likely offer limited cross-protection against future variants, causing mortality to be lower than what we’ve experienced.  While COVID-19 has been far less problematic than past diseases that ravaged humanity, the pandemic has been a massive economic problem because every Western society has a breaking point.  Even if authorities do not impose lockdowns (e.g. Sweden), citizens will impose social restrictions on themselves when the coronavirus surges in their country.

The culture wars part 5: Understanding woke ideology and why it is so effective at spreading

What woke activists actually want is a world where people get ahead through politics rather than merit.  To get there, they band together and evangelize others into a woke version of progressive liberalism.  The woke activists then hijack progressives into attacking non-racists for being racist, allowing woke activists to eliminate their political enemies.  These tactics almost always work because Western culture favours those making accusations of racism.  Progressives want to be seen as virtuously fighting racism and siding with the oppressed, so they are quick to join the side accusing others of racism.  When they eventually figure out the fraud, they usually avoid standing up to social justice bullies because they understand that the bullies will try to destroy their life for doing so.

Fighting back against woke activists is difficult because most victims have values and don’t call for their accusers to face consequences for their actions.  The woke fight dirty and their victims don’t.  This creates a situation where the woke rarely face consequences for pushing their agenda while anti-woke activists can lose their jobs and reputation.  People who see what’s happening will often join the side where their lives won’t be destroyed.