Thread by @phl43

Amazingly, not only is this wrong, but it's literally the opposite of the correct inference 🤦‍♂️

https://twitter.com/mksin149/status/1476577879668498435

If antibodies from vaccination or prior infection can't neutralize Omicron well, but vaccinated and previously infected people are still protected against severe disease, then it should obviously *increase* your credence that T-cells play a role in protecting against disease...

Of course, it also shows that T-cells won't prevent you from testing positive or even having symptoms, but nobody expected them to do that 🤷‍♂️It's amazing the nonsense "zero COVID" folks will peddle to support this policy even when they should know better.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1476556563095732224

I think another factor here might be that, at the beginning of the pandemic, dubious claims about T-cell cross-immunity were peddled (to be clear I'm not saying all such claims are crazy, only that many of them obviously were), so it has given T-cells a bad name among experts.

You would think that something like that wouldn't be a factor in science, but only if you have a very unrealistic view of what scientific communities, which are made of real people subject to fads, political biases, tribal instincts, etc. like everyone else, are actually like.

Just think about what happened with masks. Experts started by vehemently denying that masking would help suddenly did a U-turn and now treat people who oppose it like subhumans. Yet, despite the story they tell to justify this reversal, this had nothing to do with new evidence.

What happened is that at first the "right people" were saying that masking was useless so it was the cool thing to say if your social identity was tied to being an expert, but then the "right people" started to say the opposite and this resulting in a cascading phenomenon.

The reason why the "right people" suddenly changed their tune had nothing to do with "new evidence", since the evidence hadn't changed one way or the other. It was because of various other factors, starting with the fact that support for NPIs in general became an ingroup marker.

And this happens all the times in science. Very often the conclusions come first, and they are reached because of dumb social reasons, only then do people go looking for "scientific" justifications and, thanks to researcher's degrees of freedom, p-hacking, etc. they find them.

To be clear, I'm not saying they do that consciously, not at all! I think that, for the most part, they don't realize this is what is going on, but nevertheless it often *is* what is going on. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the main reasons why science is fake 🤷‍♂️