Why I think that longevity researcher Bryan Johnson just made a major mistake
Bryan is going to get two vaccines next week: Tdap and shingles. I think he's misinterpreting the science. In this article, I'll explain my reasoning.
Executive summary
Bryan Johnson’s post on X caught my attention. Johnson, a widely followed longevity researcher, said he’s getting two vaccines next week: Tdap and shingles.
He’s normally very careful about what he put in his body.
I’ll show you why I think he’s making a big mistake in this article.
The Tdap vaccine doesn’t reduce your ability to acquire or transmit pertussis
He’s getting Tdap because he believes in the human shield hypothesis.
But the reality is the vaccine can hide your ability to know you are infected, making you more likely to spread the disease.
It’s there in the peer-reviewed literature for anyone to see: “The relationship between mucosal immunity, nasopharyngeal carriage, asymptomatic transmission and the resurgence of Bordetella pertussis.”
Summary: The data suggests that relying on Tdap to stop the spread of pertussis is scientifically unsupported.
You can read the full AlterAI analysis of the paper here.
Secondly, this paper shows he’ll be priming his body to be susceptible to pertussis in the future and there is “no easy way to decrease this increased lifetime susceptibility.” So instead of reducing the risk, Bryan is actually increasing risk of transmission.
Bottom line: if he is interested in becoming a human shield, he’s doing exactly the wrong thing to achieve that goal.
The shingles vaccine does not lower your ACM by 40% like the paper shows
He’s getting the shingles vaccine because it improves longevity.
Full AlterAI analysis here. Here’s the summary:
Let me give you another example from the only publicly available record level dataset in the world on the COVID vaccine impact, the Czech Republic data.
I recently wrote about a French study that showed the COVID shots reduce your non-COVID all-cause mortality by 25%. I said was bunk because observational studies do not properly neutralize the healthy vaccinee effect.
May I show you the data about what the Czech data showed?
To avoid selection bias, I show the deaths per week for those under 60 years old regardless of vaccination status. If the shots worked, we’d expect the green line (non-COVID all cause mortality) to go down.
Instead of going down, deaths per week went up after vaccination and stayed elevated from baseline values (before the shots rolled out in early 2021)?
I’ve never shown that graph before. It’s a keeper, isn’t it?
The slope went the wrong way.
Summary
If you know Bryan Johnson, please let him know about this article.
My article won’t change his mind, but at least he’ll go into this knowing a little more than he did before.
I think Bryan Johnson is a total idiot and here’s why. He has no operating theory of the body and therefore no concept of what can hurt or help. It’s all empirical and that is often grossly misleading. He practically boils himself in sauna and can claim it’s good for him. Whatevs. I am a longevity researcher and I try to build theories of why the body works the way it does. I would never never never get a vaccine like this because of the adjuvants and many other reasons. The data supporting longevity and these vaccines has to be very low quality.
Bryan Johnson is a gullible fool, who is wrecking his body with all the various fads and fetish practices he engages in. Our family Dr. Henry Bieler who wrote in 1965 "Food is your best medicine" had a big private practice and over decades empirically determined what worked best for health. My grandmother followed his regime closely and lived to 103. Anecdotal of course, but his system theory of the body was 100 years ahead of establishment theories, and is still 40 years ahead of accepted medical science.
The human body is the most perfect thing there is and additions/subtractions are almost always going to backfire.
I am 30 years older than Mr. Johnson and expect to outlive him by simply following Dr. Bieler's recommendations and skipping all these nutty interventions - which Johnson constantly changes as he hops onto the next theory, with no long-term data
Frankly after a certain age, longevity boils down to having enough fun to enjoy sticking around, and I rarely see that discussed.