Scientific Debate or Cage Match?

The Real Victim Is The Truth

I got into a heated debate last night in a large Twitter space (hosted by @nelsonepega) and ended up losing my cool.

It started off collegial, but rapidly deteriorated into name calling and shouting.

But even up to that point the interaction was very frustrating because the people involved simply seemed intent on proving themselves right rather than trying to uncover the truth in a balanced discussion, which I find is usually far more useful than a winner take all debate.

Also there are many underhanded ways to win debates that have nothing to do with proving you’re right and everything to do with pushing peoples buttons and making the audience like/respect you and dislike/disrespect your opponent.

Trying to denigrate your opponent by calling into question their credentials is the most frequently employed of many common dirty debate techniques you’ll find in Twitter spaces, the mainstream and alternative media and in scientific and public health discourse.

Others include creating a straw man version of the argument and then knocking that down, rather than trying to deal with the “steel” man version, talking really fast, or flooding the room with sciencey sounding jargon, statistics, and data points to make yourself sound like you know what your talking about when you actually don’t or bringing up so many points your opponent can’t get to them all, sidestepping valid points and arguing something else instead, goading your opponent into overreacting, and the list goes on and on.

Last nights debate was on a couple topics, but I’ll focus on one for now: the mechanism of action of the COVID-19 vaccine.

One of the participants was Dr Joseph Lee an accomplished Lasik surgeon (a trained ophthalmologist), who has taken the time to study the immunology of vaccines and the pathophysiology of COVID-19.

This is taken from his Twitter profile:

Many of those who debate him (including some last night) like to go for the cheap points: dwelling on the fact that he is an eye doctor, making fun of him for it, claiming he doesn’t have the requisite training or knowledge to join a debate on COVID or the vaccines and is not entitled to presenting his self-researched opinions on them.

This might fly in a courtroom, where you have to prove your expertise before you can expound on a topic before the judge and jury, but in the real world it doesn’t matter. Einstein was a patent clerk, but that didn’t detract from the quality of his ideas or analysis.

The usual rejoinder is, so and so is no Einstein, but this argument also falls flat. You don’t need to be a genius or well versed in a specialized area to notice logical fallacies in another discipline, or to statistically evaluate data sets, or simply use your common sense.

The only reason an opponent would stoop to attacking your education is if they have no answer to the points you make.

Usually after the opponent is done attacking credentials, they’ll pretend to address the points, but fail to do so in any substantive way, which is what was seen last night when someone jumped on and sliced and diced Dr Lees credentials and latched onto the fact he didn’t know the intricate details of the exact mechanism of spike protein binding to ACE 2 receptor and subsequent uptake by the cell (though he understood the basic details well enough), and therefore was not qualified to have an opinion on the efficacy of the vaccine (presumably because he didn’t understand that the antibodies stuck to the viruses spike protein are supposed to prevent it from binding the ACE receptor on cells).

The takedown was very impressive from a showmanship perspective, but didn’t address Dr Lees actual case at all, and despite sounding very educated and using a lot of jargon and convincing many in the audience that he knew what he was talking about, I suspect the reason the debater sidestepped the primary issue was that he himself either didn’t understand it, or had no way to refute it.

So to back up a bit.

Dr Lees point on the vaccines is basically this: the way they are purported to work cannot be the way they do work (assuming they do work or ever did and he believes they did early on, though I do not) and the way they do work is a general effect that could have been achieved by any vaccine triggering an inflammatory reaction leading to the production of broad spectrum anti-viral compounds that have nothing to do with specific antibodies, and thus there was no basis for creating these experimental shots or mandating them.

So giving people flu shots would have worked just as well against COVID as the experimental mRNA COVID vaccines die.

His argument is that the COVID shots trigger the production of a circulating IgG antibody in the bloodstream, which has no efficient way to pass from the blood into the lung tissue, because there is a blood lung barrier (similar to the blood brain barrier) and the antibody is so large in size that it just can’t get through.

He emailed his concerns to Fauci and others at the NIH and received a reply from one of the senior members who cc’d everyone in the thread.

She cited a research paper from the 80s that mentioned a mechanism called transduction which accounts for passage of the antibodies from blood to lung, however it is extremely inefficient and apparently leads to just 1% of the antibodies crossing over.

So Dr Lee claims there cannot be enough antibodies present in the lung space to explain how the vaccines in the original trials prevented infection and severe illness (I don’t think they did, simply because the trials were fraudulently conducted).

Now I’m not aware of all the scientific details and admitted as much, bemoaning the fact we couldn’t find an immunologist or vaccinologist to clarify (and apparently none have even been willing to speak with Dr Lee in the past year), but I can posit some hypotheses for why Dr Lees argument might be wrong, and our entire COVID vaccination program was not just a castle in the air, which would require the entire virology and immunology community to be utter dolts backing a completely and obviously indefensible idea.

Maybe there are so many antibodies in the blood that 1% passing into the lung space is sufficient to ward off a usual infectious bolus of 1000-2000 virions entering the lung, maybe the blood lung barrier becomes leaky enough early in a viral infection to allow the passage of many more antibodies from the blood, maybe the effect of the vaccines is multifold, involving some antibody mediated immunity as well as T-cell mediated immunity, in addition to enhancing non specific antiviral innate immunity.

But maybe Dr Lee is right and the IgG antibody production has nothing to do with the purported effect of the vaccine and maybe it’s for the reason he states.

Maybe the NIH and everyone else in the vaccinology and immunology community is aware of this, and maybe they think trying to explain it to the lay public would just lead to confusion and pointing to antibody levels which are easily measurable and which everyone has heard of before is more about public relations and advertising.

I’m not sure, but what I do know is that no one (other than myself) has yet to directly address Dr Lee’s concerns or the core of his argument, which has led him to become extremely upset over the past year.

So I tried to get Dr Lee to see that there are some theoretical holes in his argument and it’s possible that some of the above explanations account for how the vaccinal antibodies are supposed to work (again this was just for the sake of argument as the vaccine doesn’t actually prevent infection or severe disease).

But the basic reason Dr Lee seems to be so wedded to this theory is that he believes it can be used to sue the government and big pharma, using the paper trail of his communiques with the NIH, proving that they were given notice that their vaccine project was doomed to fail from the outset and their reply was unnsatisfactory.

Unfortunately anyone familiar with the legal challenges to vaccines is aware that usually the science is not even allowed to be argued in court and this approach even if it’s on the money is very likely to be useless outside of an anti-vaxxer debate on why vaccines don’t work and the aims of Vaccinology, at least as they are currently pursued, may be misguided.

If Dr Lees theory holds water then it serves as yet another nail in the coffin for these shots as well as other shots for respiratory viruses which do not stimulate mucosal antibodies - which is a common historic criticism against them.

But the vaccine manufacturers are already pivoting to creating inhaled vaccines in an attempt to stimulate mucosal immunity, which would bypass the blood lung barrier issue and getting bogged down on any one issue while ignoring the big picture isn’t a good idea.

There are dozens of reasons why the shots were a bad idea and should be immediately pulled and everyone involved prosecuted.

Let’s use all of them to take these people down.

Finally my main point here is that theories should be allowed to stand or fall on their own, there should be nuance in public discussions and the goal should be to arrive at the truth rather than simply brow beating your opponent into a pulp in what amounts to a daytime TV cage match fought not for science, but for entertainment.