What the yolk is going on?

Widespread reports have been coming out about eggs, with most appearing to be misinformation or egregious misinterpretations.

*Cover image from Photostock Editor

Right now the US is dealing with a serious egg shortage, leading to price spikes and limited resources in certain parts of the country.

In response to this egg shortage there appears to be a sudden onslaught of different reports, with some suggesting that eggs are being blamed for blood clots as a way to distract from the vaccines. Other reports are suggesting an actual benefit to egg yolks, and thus are blaming the shortage on some conspiracy to keep us sick.

Suffice it to say that all of this information coming out have serious issues.

In particular, I came across this weird article from Yahoo! (originally from USA Today) that fact checked a claim that eggs are being blamed for all of the blood clots occurring:

The article notes that this claim came from a website called News Punch, in which the author makes a comment that eggs are somehow being used as a scapegoat for blood clots related to the vaccines, even though there doesn’t appear to be such an attempt being made by government officials (as far as I am aware):

What’s strange is that this claim makes no sense. Why would the government take away eggs if they are supposed to lead to blood clots? You’d inherently be taking away the thing that’s being blamed, thus removing the supposed scapegoat and making the relationship between vaccines and blood clots stronger by proxy.

What’s also super strange is that this information is supposedly being substantiated by ANOTHER article published in Express that appears to be the starting point for the blood clot claims:

I have a ton of issues with articles that contain these types of headlines. They’re purely clickbait and done with an intent to scare people rather than inform.

In this case, it takes a common, everyday item and makes it super horrifying by associating it with something deadly.

Now, if you actually read the article it makes reference to a study that looked at a compound called choline. It’s not necessary to know what choline is aside from the fact that it’s a critical compound for our bodies, we get it in large parts through our diet, and can be found in over-the-counter supplements.

In all cases, it’s a commonly found compound not solely found in eggs. Why would eggs be picked? Again, eggs are a common household item, so maybe that ramps up the fear factor. Also, in this case it appears that the article may have changed the headline as noted in the January 26 update.

A prior version of the article just references breakfast foods in the title:

Interestingly, the text for both articles refer to “eggs and meat” rather than just eggs alone, which makes the change in the headline rather strange. Maybe something timely may have led to an editorial change to coincide with a particular issue going on right now…

In any case, the Express article references a 2017 paper¹published in Circulation which examined microbe conversion of choline to another compound called Trimethylamine-N-Oxide (TMAO). It is this compound TMAO that appears to be associated with cardiovascular disease and thrombosis, although the evidence seems more correlative.

This study recruited omnivores as well as vegetarians/vegans:

We prospectively recruited healthy vegans/vegetarians (n=8) and omnivores (n=10) with no preceding (1-month) history of antibiotics or probiotics.

The inclusion of non-meat eaters should have raised criticisms about this study’s relationship to eggs in particular—something that should have been noticed.

The rest of the study is not necessary for this discussion, and I leave others to read the study for some additional information (note that it’s a very small study that provides only proximal data via platelet levels. Also, everyone was given the equivalent of 450 mg choline per day, which is the equivalent of 3 eggs as a frame of reference).

But what’s very frustrating is that all of this just appears to be a game of telephone, in which information was relayed with no one bothering to check the veracity of the information presented.

Again, eggs are not the only food to contain choline. In fact, many other common foods contain high levels of choline as well, so why again are eggs to blame here?

Part of Table 2 from the NIH is shown above, noting some foods rich in choline.

Someone may argue that eggs are more densely-packed with choline given their serving size, but again the evidence appears that eggs were chosen in particular due to the timing of the vaccines and the egg shortages in particular, which again doesn’t make any sense.

Instead, all this does is feed into the conspiratorial mind more than it does providing anything of substance.

Don’t be caught up in pronouncements without verifying the evidence yourself. A quick look should have raised immediate suspicions about these claims.

IgY is just a big yolk…

That leads me to another study that appears to have been circulating around recently as well.

I was alerted to this study² from a friend, who themselves appears to have gotten it from the gossip mill, as they were asked about this study.

Instead of arguing that there’s a conspiracy to blame eggs for causing blood clots, in this case there appears to be a conspiracy to suggest that eggs are actually protective, and that the government is taking away eggs so that we can’t protect ourselves from COVID.

Strange timing of events if that were true, given that COVID will no longer be considered an emergency in the coming months, unless the government is trying to create another surge of COVID to bring back the emergency by blocking our ability to get eggs. Again, more conspiracy.

It also doesn’t help that eggs were still available even during lockdowns, so wouldn’t this claim have to be reconciled with real world evidence of COVID waves that may not have been attenuated by the consumption of eggs? Anyways, I digress…or maybe not.

The argument as it relates to this study appears to suggest that antibodies from egg yolks may actually prevent the spike protein from binding to ACEII.

Great if true, and only true if one were to read the title alone.

In the same ways that critical thinking seems to have been subverted in the case of the eggs and blood clots, there appears to have been a lot of critical thinking missing in the spreading of this study.

When presented with these chicken egg yolk antibodies, ask yourselves what about these antibodies makes them so special rather than assuming some magical, benevolent powers.

Because if you think about it, you should probably figure out that these antibodies shouldn’t have inherent binding capacity for an antigen— antibodies don’t do that. The immune system has to be presented with something beforehand in order to create the antibodies necessary to target the antigen.

And that’s exactly what happened in this study. Researchers didn’t just isolate IgY from egg yolks of random hens. Instead, the eggs came from immunized hens that were given a vaccine with the S1 subunit of the spike:

The purified recombinant SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein was mixed and emulsified with Freund's immune adjuvant in equal volume and then used as an immunogen. Each hen was injected (intramuscular) with 150 μg of the recombinant spike protein under the wings, once a week for 4 weeks, and then IgY was extracted and the titer evaluated.

So no, it’s not as if antibodies taken from egg yolks somehow have some inherent, unique feature different than our own. Rather, they are operating in a similar fashion as our own antibodies, with IgY being comparable to IgG in humans³.

From Müller, et al. The structure between IgY found in hens is compared to IgG found in humans. The structures are comparable, with a noticeable difference being the hinge region found in IgG antibodies.

And no, eating any old egg yolk won’t provide some magical anti-spike IgY— again, the hen would have to have been immunized beforehand (from Müller, et al.).

But then again wouldn’t it just be easier to eat the hens given that IgY appears in the serum of hens? But I bet many people wouldn’t want to eat immunized hens anyways given the circumstances.

And it probably wouldn’t matter, as the IgY doesn’t appear to survive the gastric route given the low pH, and that wouldn’t even take into account what cooking would do to the IgY content even before it reaches your mouth.

What I’m getting at here is that this, again, is a claim that is being widely circulated but not even substantiated in the literature that is being cited.

This makes me suspicious as to how many people even bothered to read the study and noticed that you need to immunize the hens in order for them to produce the antibodies!

None of this makes any sense, and to be quite honest I’m actually frustrated by the fact that all of this has gotten the attention that it has.

“Team skeptic” has taken the position that they are more critical thinkers and more engaging of the literature, and yet studies such as these continue to circulate without any skepticism or pushback about the actual contents of these articles.

To that, just a few days ago I saw an article citing a report on Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease post-vaccination⁴, which appears to assume a rapid onset of this disease in some people who received the COVID vaccines.

For those who don’t know, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is a debilitating, rapid prion disease that leads to sudden loss of motor function, the ability to speak, and eventual loss of organ function as the brain deteriorates and can no longer signal to the rest of the body. Generally, death may come after a person with CJD can no longer breathe.

CJD, by all accounts, is a literal 1 in a million disease, which is one of the reasons why any report on even a single excess CJD diagnosis may raise some suspicions as to what may have caused it.

But CJD’s progression is also sudden. The general lifespan of someone diagnosed with CJD is several months, meaning that at the point that symptoms are realized the patient may not have much time left.

From the CDC. The above table was part of a larger table listing characteristics of CJD. Note that the median duration of the illness is around 4-5 months.

An article from the NIH also notes that around 70% of CJD patients die within a year of their diagnosis.

No matter what way you look at it, CJD is a quick, progressive disease.

Which is why the ResearchGate article linked here raises serious questions, since it mentions several times that CJD takes decades to manifest, rather than months.

Maybe I am misreading the article, but in places where the word “decade” is mentioned no citation is provided. The only text that appears to get close to what is being inferred is this one:

We also summarize in Figures 1-3 some of the surprising differences between this new form of rapidly developing Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and the much slower prion disease previously known by similar symptoms but developing not in weeks or progressing to a fatality in about one year, but developing over about a decade and lasting one or more additional decades.

Again, maybe I am misreading, but Figures 1-3 don’t appear to provide any comparison between CJD and the supposed new form brought forth by the vaccines, so I am still left wanting of where exactly the evidence is derived that suggests CJD takes decades to manifest⁵.

This article is more of an aside, but it is one of many articles I have seen that have been cited and used to push an argument when questions should have been raised as to the spin that is being put out.

In the case of the ResearchGate article, it’s possible that CJD may be related to the vaccines, but then why spin it in such a way to downplay the actual time of CJD manifestation and death, if not to create some narrative that CJD from the vaccines are completely different than other forms of CJD.

And then what’s with all of these reports on eggs? It’s clear the Wei, et al. study itself mentions that the hens were immunized beforehand. In fact, anyone who has been learning about immunology over the past 3 years should have probably assumed that to be the case.

Is this a case of people not applying the knowledge that they have gained, or is it that narrative can quickly override critical thinking to coincide with groupthink? Maybe some cognitive dissonance is at play?

---

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that this issue in reporting isn’t suddenly coming about. This appears to have been around since the COVID onset, and quite frankly may just be indicative of how science gets reported.

But that doesn’t mean that this should be par for the course. If we are to actually do our due diligence and make sure than accurate information gets out there we should make sure that we check our sources before reporting on them.

More importantly, we should do our best to correct for egregious errors. Let me be clear and state that I am just as fallible as anyone else, hence why I say that people should check my sources for errors.

And in fact, this should have been the case all along. If we are to argue in favor of free speech we should argue in favor of open discourse. Instead, it seems as if any idea is able to be thrown out without much care to the evidence, and so an unsuspecting public who may have gained a person’s trust will be none the wiser to the actual facts of the claims being made.

Something that I hope many people will become more aware of.

---

If you enjoyed this post and other works please consider supporting me through a paid Substack subscription or through my Ko-fi. Any bit helps, and it encourages independent creators and journalists outside the mainstream.

Click on the image above or visit the website at https://ko-fi.com/moderndiscontent

1. Zhu, W., Wang, Z., Tang, W. H. W., & Hazen, S. L. (2017). Gut Microbe-Generated Trimethylamine N-Oxide From Dietary Choline Is Prothrombotic in Subjects. Circulation, 135(17), 1671–1673. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.116.025338

2. Wei, S., Duan, S., Liu, X., Wang, H., Ding, S., Chen, Y., Xie, J., Tian, J., Yu, N., Ge, P., Zhang, X., Chen, X., Li, Y., & Meng, Q. (2021). Chicken Egg Yolk Antibodies (IgYs) block the binding of multiple SARS-CoV-2 spike protein variants to human ACE2. International immunopharmacology, 90, 107172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intimp.2020.107172

3. Müller, S., Schubert, A., Zajac, J. et al. IgY antibodies in human nutrition for disease prevention. Nutr J 14, 109 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-015-0067-3

4. Perez, jean-claude & Montagnier, Luc. (2023). Emergence of a New Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease: 26 Cases of the Human Version of Mad-Cow Disease, Days After a COVID-19 Injection. 10.5281/zenodo.7540331.

5. To steelman the argument, it’s possible that the authors were referring to difference in mode of CJD development. Most CJD occur without any known explanation, so in this case there may be an argument that there are features that appear to be unique with the vaccines. The article references the supposed prion-forming region of the spike that many others have named as a culprit, but again the organization of the article seems to sidestep any comparison to typical CJD.