They could do what they do in Baseball, use an asterisk to denote the achievement controversy in the records. The movie 61* comes to mind. Eventually, when the issues are resolved, the asterisk is removed.
Back to the research out there, are you saying that when I see a post like this on twitter:
"I'll post studies examining the competitiveness in sports of transgender women compared with cisgender women in the thread: "The 15–31% athletic advantage that transwomen displayed over their female counterparts prior to starting gender affirming hormones declined with feminising therapy. However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events." 2/ https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577.full
I should go ahead and post a link to your article here to counter it?
A factory produces widgets that meet certain criteria. The widgets that don't meet that criteria can't be sold as acceptable products. In other words, there will always be a certain percentage products and people that will not be completely "normal", as within societal norms. Without societal norms, there is no cohesive society. Trying to shoehorn all products/people into the "acceptable" category is a nice bit of socialist theory, but in the real world we need to accept that society works on norms, not on theories.
Your first graph with just the blue and red dots is FOUNDATIONAL. It illustrates why we have separate men's and women's sports competitions: Something about the genetic differences between mean and women makes competitions involving both sexes unfair to women.
With this foundation in place, you were able to unambiguously show where a group of women with certain differences in sexual development should compete (in the spirit of fairness). The methodology should work for any other group of "women" who are different for any reason.
It is worth noting that phenotype assigned at birth correctly determined that these athletes should compete with other women. This shouldn't have surprised anyone. However, there is always the possibility an infant with ambiguous genitalia was surgically to make them appear "normal".
I understand that the incidence of DSD, a very rare condition, is orders of magnitude greater in female athletes than in the general female population. If true, this might suggest that a DSD confers some athletic advantage.
One thing testosterone adds is competitive drive. These women went through a "male" puberty which changes the brain. I'm not talking about physical superiority. I don't think anyone can measure that effect.
The conditions are indeed rare, but incidences are not known particularly well.
That said, the issue is not just advantage, but unfair advantage, or in the characterization of World Athletics an "insuperable advantage" of 5-12%.
As CAS explains, the numbers matter.
There are countless biological and physiological characteristics that give one subset of athletes an advantage over others -- Compare the heights of Dutch volleyball players vs Indonesian volleyball players, or consider that there are specific genes associated with elite performances in sprinting and swimming (see, e.g., https://www.termedia.pl/Genetic-characteristics-of-competitive-swimmers-a-review,78,43086,0,1.html).
The evidence in our paper does not support claims of an "insuperable advantage" of the same magnitude that men have over women.
If sport organizations start regulating small advantages (say 1%) that a subset of humans might have other others, then there would be MANY biological and physiological characteristics that come into play.
Agreed there is a subjective element here. But the subtitle of the post is categorical: "Evidence does not support regulation of certain female track athletes". A more accurate subtitle would be "Evidence does not support certain female track athletes having an insuperable advantage" or "Evidence does not support certain female track athletes having the same advantage as men" or something to that effect.
One can agree that such athletes do not have an "insuperable" advantage and that they also do not have "exactly" the same advantage that men have over women and still take the position that they should nevertheless be banned from competition because there is still some advantage which is unfair. Certainly no one is saying they have zero advantage.
The 2016 Olympic Women's 800 was won by Caster Semenya, and in addition to that, Silver and Bronze medals were won by 2 other DSD athletes (Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui). The odds of that happening randomly among female athletes is close to zero. Doesn't that mean there is an advantage?
However, as you state, yours is not the argument made by WA, which is the focus of our paper.
That said, anyone claiming that an advantage that one group has over others in competition bears the burden of proof to show with evidence (a) what that advantage is, and (b) why it is unfair.
I would hypothesize that 7 ft men have an advantage in basketball over the general population that is far larger than any possible advantage held by the women regulated by WA in track. Should these men also be banned from competition?
There are plenty of examples of athletes with unique physiologies that give them some sort of advantage over their competitors. That's why they excel!
Until we have the Clone Olympics, that will always be so.
I have trouble with your graph showing career highs in green. They appear to be intersecting with male performances and are well above the female line as well as the female world record. How am I misreading it?
Without getting into the weeds too much, is it correct that the XY configuration in question reflects the fact that the gene on the Y normally responsible for producing testicles is dysfunctional, resulting in the "streak gonads" in question, or is it more complex than that?
Maybe I missed it, but do the women in question have an XX sex chromosome configuration? And I am also curious how the testosterone ambiguity was discovered. Is there standard testing on female competitors for this?
The regulations apply only to 46XY women with one of a small number of diagnoses
A few years back WADA, the anti-doping agency, changed its rules to allow anti-doping test to be used for sex testing
The issue here is not about identity (who is a real woman?) but an alleged unfair performance advantage.
World Athletics says: “[I]n no way are [the regulations] intended as any kind of judgement on or questioning of the sex or the gender identity of any athlete.”
Your use of "anti-trans" activism in foitnote 6 is unfortunate and biased. One can hold that biological men who have gone through puberty should not compete with biological women and still not be anti-trans. Other than that and without reviewing the data, I agree with your conclusion. Even if there were a significant difference, if these athletes meet the criteria of a female, however we define that (with total understanding of the inherent ambiguity of that determination),they should allowed to compete as women.
Roger, I don't really care if you are going to try to resurrect this topic and have a bro discussion.
The jury is in. DSD athletes with a male physiology are not going to be allowed to compete in the female category in the next Olympics. They are, of course, welcome to compete in the male category.
"Or you think that childhood vaccination is more risky that no vaccination? Think again." This sounds overly sweeping. Childhood vaccination is a good idea in most cases but I'm doubtful about COVID vaccination for very young people. Also, the childhood vaccination schedule varies across countries and there is no reason (no clinical basis, no studies) supporting the USA's schedule over anyone else's.
The paper “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination” concluded that the “The data indicate that unvaccinated children in the practice are not unhealthier than the vaccinated and indeed the overall results may indicate that the unvaccinated pediatric patients in this practice are healthier overall than the vaccinated.” https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8674 I hope we’ll see more papers on this vax/unvacced topic with RFK at the HHS.
Mira: The paper you cited has been corrected and then retracted.
Compared with all other treatments, vaccinations are usually relatively safe because most of the antigen is cleared from the body within a few days. After that, the only thing left behind in the body are antibodies which certainly can cause side effects. Anti-spike antibodies produced by vaccination almost certainly cause cardiomyopathy - in 1 out of 100,000 people and about 1 out of 10,000 males aged 13-26. However, antibody levels peak between 1 and 2 weeks after exposure to an antigen, so problems associated with vaccination almost certainly will appear within one month of vaccination and thus are relatively easy to detect and quantify. Furthermore, mRNA and other vaccines often raise antibodies to the same antigen that is found in the pathogen. Consequently both the spike protein produced by vaccination and by natural infection produce antibodies that cause myocarditis. However, a natural infection that produces uncontrolled amounts of spike protein in many critical tissues is probably far more dangerous than controlled production of spike protein localized to a limited number of muscle cells in your arm (and the nearest lymph node) is a far riskier way to acquire immunity to COVID.
Everyone is going to be producing antibodies to evolving spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2. The question is whether you want to produce those antibodies in response to a vaccination that 99+% of the time makes you feel "under the weather" for a day or so or make those antibodies in response an infection that had a 1% chance of killing the average American, a 1% chance of leaving you with long Covid lasting a year or more, a 5% chance of sending you to the hospital, a 50% chance of being miserably ill for a week and needing to isolate from family and friends. Actually those were the risks associated with the pre-Omicron variants; omicron variants are about 10-fold less dangerous. Or I could express the dilemma differently: Back when polio was a real problem. did you want to develop antibodies to poliovirus from a vaccination or a natural infection? Only 1% of polio infections produced a sign of paralysis.
Mrna enters the bloodstream almost 100% of the time. "Controlled production" of the spike protein is a fantasy. There's no on-off switch in the experimental gene therapy shots.
Windy: When scientist look in animal models, spike protein is expressed only in the vicinity of the site of injection and the nearest lymph node. The amount expressed is proportional to the size of the dose administered, because mRNA can not be replicated (or converted to DNA) by any biological machinery in humans. The "on-off" switch in mRNA vaccines are ubiquitous RNAases found everywhere that degrade RNA. Scientists working with RNA have to be careful to not touch anything without gloves, because were is enough RNAase in our fingerprints to destroy the RNA in a sample if it is put into a container someone has touched. The mRNA in a coronavirus is replicated by viral proteins in the virus itself, so viral infections are only controlled by our immune systems (which kill virus infected cells BTW). mRNA can not enter cells once it is no longer associated with the lipid nanoparticles in which it is formulated and administered. These are relatively large particles. They don't "go everywhere".
Scientists have been exploring the potential of mRNA based therapeutics in many laboratories around the the world for more than a decade in 2020. The problems you (and scientists) feared have been investigated and found to be under control well before the pandemic launched a bunch of conspiracy theorists. The FDA doesn't authorize vaccines on its own. It first convenes an outside panel of expert doctors who regularly see patients and who have no significant financial interest in the vaccines or new drugs they recommend the FDA approve or disapprove. These advisory doctors see the families of children killed or harmed by your "death shot". Their children and family members are given the "death shot". They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by approving the "death shot" except the satisfaction of seeing their patients not dying or being seriously harmed by the COVID infections. I don't fully trust all of the scientists and doctors who worked for politicians in government desperately fighting a pandemic. I wouldn't fully trust the scientists at a company like Moderna whose bonuses and jobs depend on the success of the coronavirus vaccine, but they pay hospitals to run the clinical trials and collect patient data and the hospitals have no idea who has been given vaccine and who has been given drug. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, the clinical trials were run at about 100 hospitals each with ethics committees supervising and dozens of personnel directly inputting the data they collect into a remote database being shared with the FDA. And this same process is going on in more than a dozen medically sophisticated countries. If you had understood the process before hearing from conspiracy theorists, you would almost certainly trust it.
Now, I don't personally full understand why the FDA is so eager to vaccinate children. It is a classic situation where the risks are minuscule and the benefits small. European countries aren't as eager to vaccinate their children as we are. I would look more deeply before vaccinating my children for COVID. However, death isn't the only consideration. I don't want my children getting sick enough with COVID to need hospitalization, nor even unnecessarily getting seriously ill at home. You've been reading about the 100 unvaccinated children in Texas now suffering from a measles outbreak. Only one has died, but many have been hospitalized and many other have been seriously ill. Worse they are infecting their fellow students.
Windy: Yes there were any enormous number of excess deaths during the pandemic, mostly from people dying from COVID. If I understand correctly, there were about 1.2 million deaths confirmed to be due to COVID (usually defined as occurring within a month of a positive PCR test) and about 1.4 million excess deaths. The reason for those 0.2 million excess deaths isn't known, but they started in 2020, long before any vaccine was administered, so these many excess deaths weren't due to vaccination.
Serious vaccine side effects occur by two mechanisms: 1) an immediate response like that to a bee sting (anaphylactic shock) and 2) a response to the antibodies the antigen creates when those antibodies attack normal cells in the body. Those side effects usually peak about the same time antibody levels peak, 1-2 weeks after vaccination. Myocarditis is likely due to anti-spike protein antibodies attacking the heart. These rare side effects occur whether the anti-spike antibodies are created in response to vaccination or to natural infection and they occur more seriously and often in response to natural infection.
Here are some possible reasons for the excess deaths during the COVID pandemic besides vaccine toxicity: 1) Your immune system deals with virus infected cells by KILLING those cells. A significant fraction of those who were hospitalized with COVID recovered, but have been suffering from symptoms of long COVID: brain fog, shortness of breath and other symptoms. The "excess deaths" are occurring among those who were left weaken or damaged by battling COVID. 2) In the elderly, when one spouse dies, the chances the surviving spouse will die within a year or so go up significantly. The stress of dealing with the death of a spouse overwhelms the ability of the surviving spouse to fight off acute and chronic illnesses. 3) People skipped normal or routine medical care to avoid getting infected and suffered the consequences. 4) Excess deaths were more common among the less affluent and minorities, even though they were less likely to get vaccinated.
The problem with analyzing excessive death data is you don't have the slightest idea of whether those suffering these excess deaths were vaccinated or not.
Giving the death shot to children who had virtually zero risk from Covid was a crime against humanity. Roger, you need to check out Steve Kirsch's substack.
I think that is very important research. Unfortunately, it may not completely answer the question of whether women with DSD have on average an athletic advantage over regular women. Here’s a quote from the paper linked below:
“The incidence of 46,XY DSD in the general population is estimated to be 1 in 20,000 births. In comparison, the prevalence of this condition among female athletes participating in the World Championships was 7 in 1000, that is, 140-fold higher”.
1. Prevalence estimates of individuals with natural sex variations in the overall population are not particularly well known. The 1 in 20,000 is a fairly old guesstimate.
2. The 7 in 1000 produced by IAAF in support of regulation is easily shown to be a false number, as it includes several individuals with PAIS. The actual number was 4 of 849 athletes at the 2011 World Championships, or 4.7 out of 1,000. The difference between 4.7 and 7 doesn't make a difference to their argument, so why do they exaggerate?
But let's take the numbers at face value. Prevalence of individuals with certain biological or physiological characteristics different from the overall human population can not be the basis for regulation of unfair advantage. For instance, you'll find a much higher prevalence of tall athletes in basketball, muscular athletes in weightlifting, black athletes in sprinting, and on and on. Natural variations in humanity is celebrated in sport.
Of course, we implement weight classes in boxing, there is 6 foot and under basketball, and so on. We can make the rules however we want them. There could of course be the XX and XY games, but sport has always had men's and women's categories, which are mostly but not completely the same thing.
Sport is an excellent selector of unique human traits. So even if women with natural sex variations were to be found in sport at a higher rate than in the general population, that itself is not evidence of an unfair performance advantage in competition.
Why would we want to base track competition on a biological trait of a subset of women if there is no evidence that they have an unfair performance advantage?
This is where the issue often slips into identity politics . . .
This point is discussed explicitly in the paper. However, there is no evidence of a 10% or 1% advantage for this population. The question of a 1% advantage was also discussed in the CAS ruling on Chand.
The rules for commenting on this post are clear. No discussion or speculation about the private medical information of any individual. The many errors in this comment illustrate why this matters. No more of this.
The information I posted about Caster Semenya is on wikipedia. It is widely available. You have invoked the example of Semenya, but you are not willing to discuss the specifics of their biology that render them male, not female. So this is a phony discussion.
You also removed the information I posted about female menstruation and how that affects female athletes.
So it appears that you have great interest in DSDs, but little interest in female athletes.
Fascinating. Some may question the (understandably) small sample size, but many observational studies have a small n. I had trouble reconciling your study’s conclusions with the 2nd (Gollish) chart, which showed a subset of your cohort outperforming women including the women’s world record for that event. What did I miss?
The nine women are in one respect a sample from a larger population, but in another they are the entire population who is currently banned from competition. These are the women that WA alleges have an unfair advantage. In fact, there has never been any woman in the history of track and field who has performed like an elite male athlete, including high school boys.
No women in our study has achieved a world record.
The 800M at Paris was run tactically, and is discussed in detail in the paper. The two women who ran faster than the winning Paris time in the 800M did not set a world record, nor do their times approach those of men.
They could do what they do in Baseball, use an asterisk to denote the achievement controversy in the records. The movie 61* comes to mind. Eventually, when the issues are resolved, the asterisk is removed.
Back to the research out there, are you saying that when I see a post like this on twitter:
https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1697087025197744550 - @benryanwriter saying:
"I'll post studies examining the competitiveness in sports of transgender women compared with cisgender women in the thread: "The 15–31% athletic advantage that transwomen displayed over their female counterparts prior to starting gender affirming hormones declined with feminising therapy. However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events." 2/ https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577.full
I should go ahead and post a link to your article here to counter it?
A factory produces widgets that meet certain criteria. The widgets that don't meet that criteria can't be sold as acceptable products. In other words, there will always be a certain percentage products and people that will not be completely "normal", as within societal norms. Without societal norms, there is no cohesive society. Trying to shoehorn all products/people into the "acceptable" category is a nice bit of socialist theory, but in the real world we need to accept that society works on norms, not on theories.
Your first graph with just the blue and red dots is FOUNDATIONAL. It illustrates why we have separate men's and women's sports competitions: Something about the genetic differences between mean and women makes competitions involving both sexes unfair to women.
With this foundation in place, you were able to unambiguously show where a group of women with certain differences in sexual development should compete (in the spirit of fairness). The methodology should work for any other group of "women" who are different for any reason.
It is worth noting that phenotype assigned at birth correctly determined that these athletes should compete with other women. This shouldn't have surprised anyone. However, there is always the possibility an infant with ambiguous genitalia was surgically to make them appear "normal".
I understand that the incidence of DSD, a very rare condition, is orders of magnitude greater in female athletes than in the general female population. If true, this might suggest that a DSD confers some athletic advantage.
One thing testosterone adds is competitive drive. These women went through a "male" puberty which changes the brain. I'm not talking about physical superiority. I don't think anyone can measure that effect.
The conditions are indeed rare, but incidences are not known particularly well.
That said, the issue is not just advantage, but unfair advantage, or in the characterization of World Athletics an "insuperable advantage" of 5-12%.
As CAS explains, the numbers matter.
There are countless biological and physiological characteristics that give one subset of athletes an advantage over others -- Compare the heights of Dutch volleyball players vs Indonesian volleyball players, or consider that there are specific genes associated with elite performances in sprinting and swimming (see, e.g., https://www.termedia.pl/Genetic-characteristics-of-competitive-swimmers-a-review,78,43086,0,1.html).
The evidence in our paper does not support claims of an "insuperable advantage" of the same magnitude that men have over women.
If sport organizations start regulating small advantages (say 1%) that a subset of humans might have other others, then there would be MANY biological and physiological characteristics that come into play.
Agreed there is a subjective element here. But the subtitle of the post is categorical: "Evidence does not support regulation of certain female track athletes". A more accurate subtitle would be "Evidence does not support certain female track athletes having an insuperable advantage" or "Evidence does not support certain female track athletes having the same advantage as men" or something to that effect.
Ha! Agreed!
Headlines and subtitles would be much easier if they could be much longer ;-)
But point taken ,thx
One can agree that such athletes do not have an "insuperable" advantage and that they also do not have "exactly" the same advantage that men have over women and still take the position that they should nevertheless be banned from competition because there is still some advantage which is unfair. Certainly no one is saying they have zero advantage.
The 2016 Olympic Women's 800 was won by Caster Semenya, and in addition to that, Silver and Bronze medals were won by 2 other DSD athletes (Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui). The odds of that happening randomly among female athletes is close to zero. Doesn't that mean there is an advantage?
Of course.
However, as you state, yours is not the argument made by WA, which is the focus of our paper.
That said, anyone claiming that an advantage that one group has over others in competition bears the burden of proof to show with evidence (a) what that advantage is, and (b) why it is unfair.
I would hypothesize that 7 ft men have an advantage in basketball over the general population that is far larger than any possible advantage held by the women regulated by WA in track. Should these men also be banned from competition?
There are plenty of examples of athletes with unique physiologies that give them some sort of advantage over their competitors. That's why they excel!
Until we have the Clone Olympics, that will always be so.
I have trouble with your graph showing career highs in green. They appear to be intersecting with male performances and are well above the female line as well as the female world record. How am I misreading it?
Without getting into the weeds too much, is it correct that the XY configuration in question reflects the fact that the gene on the Y normally responsible for producing testicles is dysfunctional, resulting in the "streak gonads" in question, or is it more complex than that?
Thanks.
Thanks for the Q
Higher on the Y axis means slower
Does that make sense?
Reading deficit, see it now. You flushed out my inherent bias by doing men in red and women in blue.
Maybe I missed it, but do the women in question have an XX sex chromosome configuration? And I am also curious how the testosterone ambiguity was discovered. Is there standard testing on female competitors for this?
Thanks.
The regulations apply only to 46XY women with one of a small number of diagnoses
A few years back WADA, the anti-doping agency, changed its rules to allow anti-doping test to be used for sex testing
The issue here is not about identity (who is a real woman?) but an alleged unfair performance advantage.
World Athletics says: “[I]n no way are [the regulations] intended as any kind of judgement on or questioning of the sex or the gender identity of any athlete.”
Thanks. I learned something.
Your use of "anti-trans" activism in foitnote 6 is unfortunate and biased. One can hold that biological men who have gone through puberty should not compete with biological women and still not be anti-trans. Other than that and without reviewing the data, I agree with your conclusion. Even if there were a significant difference, if these athletes meet the criteria of a female, however we define that (with total understanding of the inherent ambiguity of that determination),they should allowed to compete as women.
I full agree with your second sentence. 100%. That said, I'm also 100% comfortable with footnote 6.
What about championship men with naturally higher testosterone than average males? #BlurredLines
Almost all the commenters here are men.
Roger, I don't really care if you are going to try to resurrect this topic and have a bro discussion.
The jury is in. DSD athletes with a male physiology are not going to be allowed to compete in the female category in the next Olympics. They are, of course, welcome to compete in the male category.
Maybe they should be competing against low testo men...
"Or you think that childhood vaccination is more risky that no vaccination? Think again." This sounds overly sweeping. Childhood vaccination is a good idea in most cases but I'm doubtful about COVID vaccination for very young people. Also, the childhood vaccination schedule varies across countries and there is no reason (no clinical basis, no studies) supporting the USA's schedule over anyone else's.
The paper “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination” concluded that the “The data indicate that unvaccinated children in the practice are not unhealthier than the vaccinated and indeed the overall results may indicate that the unvaccinated pediatric patients in this practice are healthier overall than the vaccinated.” https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8674 I hope we’ll see more papers on this vax/unvacced topic with RFK at the HHS.
Mira: The paper you cited has been corrected and then retracted.
Compared with all other treatments, vaccinations are usually relatively safe because most of the antigen is cleared from the body within a few days. After that, the only thing left behind in the body are antibodies which certainly can cause side effects. Anti-spike antibodies produced by vaccination almost certainly cause cardiomyopathy - in 1 out of 100,000 people and about 1 out of 10,000 males aged 13-26. However, antibody levels peak between 1 and 2 weeks after exposure to an antigen, so problems associated with vaccination almost certainly will appear within one month of vaccination and thus are relatively easy to detect and quantify. Furthermore, mRNA and other vaccines often raise antibodies to the same antigen that is found in the pathogen. Consequently both the spike protein produced by vaccination and by natural infection produce antibodies that cause myocarditis. However, a natural infection that produces uncontrolled amounts of spike protein in many critical tissues is probably far more dangerous than controlled production of spike protein localized to a limited number of muscle cells in your arm (and the nearest lymph node) is a far riskier way to acquire immunity to COVID.
Everyone is going to be producing antibodies to evolving spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2. The question is whether you want to produce those antibodies in response to a vaccination that 99+% of the time makes you feel "under the weather" for a day or so or make those antibodies in response an infection that had a 1% chance of killing the average American, a 1% chance of leaving you with long Covid lasting a year or more, a 5% chance of sending you to the hospital, a 50% chance of being miserably ill for a week and needing to isolate from family and friends. Actually those were the risks associated with the pre-Omicron variants; omicron variants are about 10-fold less dangerous. Or I could express the dilemma differently: Back when polio was a real problem. did you want to develop antibodies to poliovirus from a vaccination or a natural infection? Only 1% of polio infections produced a sign of paralysis.
Mrna enters the bloodstream almost 100% of the time. "Controlled production" of the spike protein is a fantasy. There's no on-off switch in the experimental gene therapy shots.
Windy: When scientist look in animal models, spike protein is expressed only in the vicinity of the site of injection and the nearest lymph node. The amount expressed is proportional to the size of the dose administered, because mRNA can not be replicated (or converted to DNA) by any biological machinery in humans. The "on-off" switch in mRNA vaccines are ubiquitous RNAases found everywhere that degrade RNA. Scientists working with RNA have to be careful to not touch anything without gloves, because were is enough RNAase in our fingerprints to destroy the RNA in a sample if it is put into a container someone has touched. The mRNA in a coronavirus is replicated by viral proteins in the virus itself, so viral infections are only controlled by our immune systems (which kill virus infected cells BTW). mRNA can not enter cells once it is no longer associated with the lipid nanoparticles in which it is formulated and administered. These are relatively large particles. They don't "go everywhere".
Scientists have been exploring the potential of mRNA based therapeutics in many laboratories around the the world for more than a decade in 2020. The problems you (and scientists) feared have been investigated and found to be under control well before the pandemic launched a bunch of conspiracy theorists. The FDA doesn't authorize vaccines on its own. It first convenes an outside panel of expert doctors who regularly see patients and who have no significant financial interest in the vaccines or new drugs they recommend the FDA approve or disapprove. These advisory doctors see the families of children killed or harmed by your "death shot". Their children and family members are given the "death shot". They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by approving the "death shot" except the satisfaction of seeing their patients not dying or being seriously harmed by the COVID infections. I don't fully trust all of the scientists and doctors who worked for politicians in government desperately fighting a pandemic. I wouldn't fully trust the scientists at a company like Moderna whose bonuses and jobs depend on the success of the coronavirus vaccine, but they pay hospitals to run the clinical trials and collect patient data and the hospitals have no idea who has been given vaccine and who has been given drug. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, the clinical trials were run at about 100 hospitals each with ethics committees supervising and dozens of personnel directly inputting the data they collect into a remote database being shared with the FDA. And this same process is going on in more than a dozen medically sophisticated countries. If you had understood the process before hearing from conspiracy theorists, you would almost certainly trust it.
Now, I don't personally full understand why the FDA is so eager to vaccinate children. It is a classic situation where the risks are minuscule and the benefits small. European countries aren't as eager to vaccinate their children as we are. I would look more deeply before vaccinating my children for COVID. However, death isn't the only consideration. I don't want my children getting sick enough with COVID to need hospitalization, nor even unnecessarily getting seriously ill at home. You've been reading about the 100 unvaccinated children in Texas now suffering from a measles outbreak. Only one has died, but many have been hospitalized and many other have been seriously ill. Worse they are infecting their fellow students.
Two words blow away everything in your odious spiel. "Excess deaths". You're welcome.
Windy: Yes there were any enormous number of excess deaths during the pandemic, mostly from people dying from COVID. If I understand correctly, there were about 1.2 million deaths confirmed to be due to COVID (usually defined as occurring within a month of a positive PCR test) and about 1.4 million excess deaths. The reason for those 0.2 million excess deaths isn't known, but they started in 2020, long before any vaccine was administered, so these many excess deaths weren't due to vaccination.
Serious vaccine side effects occur by two mechanisms: 1) an immediate response like that to a bee sting (anaphylactic shock) and 2) a response to the antibodies the antigen creates when those antibodies attack normal cells in the body. Those side effects usually peak about the same time antibody levels peak, 1-2 weeks after vaccination. Myocarditis is likely due to anti-spike protein antibodies attacking the heart. These rare side effects occur whether the anti-spike antibodies are created in response to vaccination or to natural infection and they occur more seriously and often in response to natural infection.
Here are some possible reasons for the excess deaths during the COVID pandemic besides vaccine toxicity: 1) Your immune system deals with virus infected cells by KILLING those cells. A significant fraction of those who were hospitalized with COVID recovered, but have been suffering from symptoms of long COVID: brain fog, shortness of breath and other symptoms. The "excess deaths" are occurring among those who were left weaken or damaged by battling COVID. 2) In the elderly, when one spouse dies, the chances the surviving spouse will die within a year or so go up significantly. The stress of dealing with the death of a spouse overwhelms the ability of the surviving spouse to fight off acute and chronic illnesses. 3) People skipped normal or routine medical care to avoid getting infected and suffered the consequences. 4) Excess deaths were more common among the less affluent and minorities, even though they were less likely to get vaccinated.
The problem with analyzing excessive death data is you don't have the slightest idea of whether those suffering these excess deaths were vaccinated or not.
Giving the death shot to children who had virtually zero risk from Covid was a crime against humanity. Roger, you need to check out Steve Kirsch's substack.
Right -- Evidence matters.
Roger, this question is admittedly off-topic but what are your thoughts on Trump withdrawing the US support for the latest UN IPCC meeting?
Off topic, but OK ;-)
Funnily, I was just exploring this.
Possible THB post on it to come . . . When I am more informed I'll be happy to comment.
I think that is very important research. Unfortunately, it may not completely answer the question of whether women with DSD have on average an athletic advantage over regular women. Here’s a quote from the paper linked below:
“The incidence of 46,XY DSD in the general population is estimated to be 1 in 20,000 births. In comparison, the prevalence of this condition among female athletes participating in the World Championships was 7 in 1000, that is, 140-fold higher”.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7159262/
What is your take on this research?
Great Q. A few thoughts:
1. Prevalence estimates of individuals with natural sex variations in the overall population are not particularly well known. The 1 in 20,000 is a fairly old guesstimate.
2. The 7 in 1000 produced by IAAF in support of regulation is easily shown to be a false number, as it includes several individuals with PAIS. The actual number was 4 of 849 athletes at the 2011 World Championships, or 4.7 out of 1,000. The difference between 4.7 and 7 doesn't make a difference to their argument, so why do they exaggerate?
But let's take the numbers at face value. Prevalence of individuals with certain biological or physiological characteristics different from the overall human population can not be the basis for regulation of unfair advantage. For instance, you'll find a much higher prevalence of tall athletes in basketball, muscular athletes in weightlifting, black athletes in sprinting, and on and on. Natural variations in humanity is celebrated in sport.
Of course, we implement weight classes in boxing, there is 6 foot and under basketball, and so on. We can make the rules however we want them. There could of course be the XX and XY games, but sport has always had men's and women's categories, which are mostly but not completely the same thing.
Sport is an excellent selector of unique human traits. So even if women with natural sex variations were to be found in sport at a higher rate than in the general population, that itself is not evidence of an unfair performance advantage in competition.
Why would we want to base track competition on a biological trait of a subset of women if there is no evidence that they have an unfair performance advantage?
This is where the issue often slips into identity politics . . .
Again, not all DSDs are the same, so it is inaccurate and misleading to lump them all together. The specifics matter.
The above are weasel words.
The WA DSD regulations are specific as to what biological conditions they are regulating. They do not regulate all DSDs.
How do women athletes feel about a 1% advantage vs 10%?
Are they ok with someone having a 1% advantage over them?
This point is discussed explicitly in the paper. However, there is no evidence of a 10% or 1% advantage for this population. The question of a 1% advantage was also discussed in the CAS ruling on Chand.
At this level of competition any advantage is magnified and we are talking hundredths of a second difference between winning and losing.
Again, curious how women athletes feel about this.
I understand this topic has absolutely no relation to the question of biological men identifying as women competing In women’s sports.
Saying that there is a 1% or 10% advantage is relatively meaningless.
The difference in testosterone levels for Semenya was more than 10%.
The rules for commenting on this post are clear. No discussion or speculation about the private medical information of any individual. The many errors in this comment illustrate why this matters. No more of this.
The information I posted about Caster Semenya is on wikipedia. It is widely available. You have invoked the example of Semenya, but you are not willing to discuss the specifics of their biology that render them male, not female. So this is a phony discussion.
You also removed the information I posted about female menstruation and how that affects female athletes.
So it appears that you have great interest in DSDs, but little interest in female athletes.
No surprise. Just like a lot of men.
Fascinating. Some may question the (understandably) small sample size, but many observational studies have a small n. I had trouble reconciling your study’s conclusions with the 2nd (Gollish) chart, which showed a subset of your cohort outperforming women including the women’s world record for that event. What did I miss?
The nine women are in one respect a sample from a larger population, but in another they are the entire population who is currently banned from competition. These are the women that WA alleges have an unfair advantage. In fact, there has never been any woman in the history of track and field who has performed like an elite male athlete, including high school boys.
No women in our study has achieved a world record.
The 800M at Paris was run tactically, and is discussed in detail in the paper. The two women who ran faster than the winning Paris time in the 800M did not set a world record, nor do their times approach those of men.
Thanks for clarifying that for me.