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Vexing Vax Performance Puzzles
Bloomberg is hardly right-wing conspiracy central, nor is it a Hollyweird lefty anti-vax, anti-fluoride media organ. So, their recent straight reporting article on the comparative efficacy of natural versus vaccine-induced COVID-19 immunity against the Delta variant is a noteworthy from the leftist scientism party line. Bloomberg reports on a very large sample study of the Israeli population, and commendably links directly to the medRxiv paper.
While not conclusive, this study reinforces a century or more of human experience and underlines the abject failure of every single Republican executive, from your favorite governor to President Trump and Vice President Pence, to compel truth-telling in public health bureaucracy web graphics. From Day 1, we should have seen a steadily increasing number of Americans with naturally acquired immunity, eventually joined by a faster-growing number of Americans with vaccine-induced immunity. The first governor to force this truth into the open will be the prohibitive favorite for presidential nomination in 2024.
medRxiv is “the preprint server for health services.” All papers, and the web portal, bear the proper notice:
Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The paper in question makes claims and reports conclusions that are quite conventional, not “controversial,” since the day General George Washington had his troops at Valley Forge line up for cow pox inoculation. In short, Israel aggressively, early administered the two-dose Pfizer vaccine. Their politicians and public health officials started from a real science perspective, so did not strike the anti-scientific scientism pose that people who recovered from COVID-19 needed to be jabbed right along with everyone else. More recently, Israeli public health officials recommended a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine as a booster against newer variants for those with naturally acquired immunity.
This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
Consider how three states with Republican governors, Arizona, South Dakota, and Florida, have communicated the level of immunity in their populations.
Arizona has consistently provided clear and fairly comprehensive charts and map graphics on Arizona’s COVID-19 web page. Let’s look at the numbers.
Cumulative Cases: 1,007,854
Cumulative Deaths: 18,787
From these two numbers we can fairly conclude the number naturally immune = 1,007,854 cases -18,787 deaths = 989,067 recovered with natural immunity. In a rational, truly scientific world, none of these would be early “vaccinated”, so we would be at:
4,012,495 artificially immunized by vaccination PLUS 989,067 naturally immunized by live virus exposure = 5,001,562 with immunity
However, not all “cases” are confirmed cases, so let’s adjust for the most certain answer. 927195 confirmed cases -16745 deaths= 910,450 confirmed natural immunity.
4,012,495 vaccinated + 910,450 recovered = 4,922,945 confirmed immunity
AZ population estimate: 7,189,020
SO, the true immunization rate in AZ = 5,001,562/7189020 = 69.6% immunized
AZ falsely reports only 55.8% people vaccinated. There is an enormous difference between 55.8 and 69.6. The first looks like barely more than half. The second is clearly more than 2/3. The first is a lab-coat leftist lie for continued control by panic porn. The second is historically, true medical science based, factual information. Lord Governor Ducey owns this.
Surely Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has done better in messaging. After all, he has been the focus of media personal destruction efforts. Sadly, not only does his state not provide clear and comprehensive graphics, the Florida COVID-19 data document they serve up is much less informative than Arizona’s dashboard.
Cumulative cases: 3,179,714
Cumulative deaths: 43,979
SO: 3,179,714- 43,979 = 3135735 recovered with natural immunity
10,785,185 completely vaccinated + 3,135,735 recovered with natural immunity = 13,920,920
Total Florida 2021 population estimate = 21,975,117
Percent total population with immunity = 13,920,920/21,975,117 = 63.3%
Florida shows nothing of hospital utilization, so lets leftist lies flourish. At the same time, Florida recognizes the mental health risks of COVID-19.
The outbreak of COVID-19 is stressful for most people. Fear and anxiety about a disease can be overwhelming and cause strong emotions in adults and children. Taking care of yourself, your friends, and your family can help you cope with stress. Helping others cope with their stress can also make your community stronger.
It is natural to feel stress, anxiety, grief, and worry during an ongoing crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone reacts differently and your own feelings will change over time. Notice and accept how you feel. Taking care of your emotional health will help you think clearly and react to the urgent needs to protect yourself and your family. Self-care will help your long-term healing.
Kudos to South Dakota and Governor Kristi Noem for shown “Recovered Cases” on their COVID dashboard homepage. Add to this praise the best vaccination tracker table, based on the 2019 census estimate of 12+ year olds.
195675 Pfizer +26,369 J&J +149138 Moderna = 371,182 fully vaccinated
124,722 Recovered = 124,722 natural immunity
So, South Dakota’s total immunity = 371,182+124,722= 495,904
South Dakota 2019 population: 884,659
495,904/ 884,659= 56.1% total South Dakota population with COVID-19 immunity. AND YET, even South Dakota has failed to communicate real immunization status, the real ability to resist an infection so serious it causes hospitalization and death.
Governors Ducey, DeSantis, and Noem have all failed to fully inform their own populations and have failed to push the terms of national conversation towards true medical science. Consider the National Institutes of Health early position on naturally acquired immunity:
- The immune systems of more than 95% of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection.
- The results provide hope that people receiving SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will develop similar lasting immune memories after vaccination.
I am sure the governors or their staff read the Wall Street Journal, among other major media sources, so they were likely primed on the subject of immunity truth-telling back in June, when Marty Makary wrote “The Power of Natural Immunity.”
The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard. Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed.
Only around 10% of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection. A February study in Nature used antibody screenings in late summer 2020 to estimate there had been seven times as many actual cases as confirmed cases. A similar study, by the University of Albany and New York State Department of Health, revealed that by the end of March 2020—the first month of New York’s pandemic—23% of the city’s population had antibodies. That share necessarily increased as the pandemic spread.
This is not hard math. The relevant data is already in each state’s public reporting. And yet, every single one of these supposedly courageous, competent governors has given the upper hand to the panic porn propaganda of the lying lab-coat left, led by Tony Fraudci. I have not examined every state’s data presentation. Please look at your own state or states and share any instance of more informative data presentation.
Published in Domestic Policy
The Governors have to stick with what their experts tell them, so I wouldn’t be too hard on them.
The problem with breakthrough cases is that some unknown number of people who get “breakthrough” COVID are people who carry counterfeit vaccine cards, which are a big thing in some states.
By the same token, the problem with natural immunity is that some unknown percentage of people who claim to have had COVID never did.
Why would anyone ‘claim’ to have a disease/illness they never had? Just curious.
The NIH budget is $41.7B per year. They have not spent any on proving/disproving the effectiveness of off-patent drugs against Wuhan Lab Flu. The NIH seems to have released just one serology survey in 2021. They have plenty of money, so being this bad means they are either corrupt or incompetent and I don’t think all those MD’s and PhDs are stupid. We have a healthcare system that is captured by big corporations and power-hungry political hacks that give money and market protection to their cronies. The information vacuum created allows for the creation of fear through a continuous psy-op, which is used to boost profits and power. The ordinary working man is the loser.
The only confounding item is that many who recovered and have natural immunity were pushed into vaccination anyways by CDC propaganda. There’s no tracking anywhere of this overlap. /:
I cannot find an answer to this anywhere. Perhaps you know the answer.
The people who were vaccinated earliest with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were the most vulnerable to become very sick in their response to the virus. Those vaccines started in Massachusetts–and I assume the rest of the country–in late February 2021, just about the time Delta variant arose in England. Pfizer and Moderna paused in late March to tweak the vaccine formula so that it better protected people from the Delta variant.
I am wondering if the Delta hospitalization and death breakthrough cases we are seeing (and we’re seeing a sudden and sharp increase in Massachusetts this week) across the country are in patients who got the early version of the vaccine.
Have you seen any information on that?
Thank you.
The Israeli data likely does not suffer from the confounding variables you posit. Nor are the numbers I cite from each state in any way self-reporting. These are all medical professional confirmed cases.
Governors and the president most certainly did not need to stick with “experts” whose opening gambits were so panicky, so unsupported by peer reviewed real science. Five Whys would have made all the difference. Demanding real public health analysis, with all the huge competing risks of cancer, heart disease, suicide, drug overdose — all predictable, actually quantifiable results of the entirely unscientific lockdown “prescription” would have made a massive positive difference in both the short and long term for real public health.
This is an important question along with whether the recipients of vaccinations who get “breakthrough” cases should get boosters. Or whether “breakthrough” cases have the same or different immunities than the recovered unvaccinated?
These are important questions to which I have not seen answers.
Excellent take on the overall picture of the corruption – both activity-wise types of corruption, and omission-wise types.
My husband lost not one, not two, not three, but four uncles to hemachromatosis before the fifth uncle came down with enlarged heart and cardiac problems, so finally a real diagnosis was made.
So four brothers died too young. But the big picture is that one in 200 families in the USA suffers from this genetic disease. Chronic fatigue, lethargy, brain fog, irritability, enlarged organs, with early menopause and infertility for women. (By early menopause, I mean it occurs before the age of 30.)
In a nation that cared about its citizens, people would be screened for this. One in every 200 people who need to avoid having their lives made so difficult for decades by the hardening of their organs as their bodies absorb too much iron. I bet such a screening would cost less than the cost of a family wearing masks for a year.
The other thing is once an individual knows they have it, the situation is able to be reversed rather cheaply and easily. A doctor’s office schedules an appointment, and the patient is bled in the same way that happens when we go in and donate blood.
What do you wanna bet that if Fauci thought his buddies at Pfizer or Moderna could produce a vaccine for the condition, we would all be required to be screened for the condition by the end of the year?
And this is just one of the many health ailments people have that impact their lives and yet is left untreated.
Temptime, any situation that is offered up as a way to determine reality, or at least take an alternate view of the officially accepted reality, regarding certain issues — that situation is always going to be slammed by some people.
Example: A neighbor’s husband died 14 hours after being jabbed and she reported it to VAERS? That argumentative person is going to say they would have died anyway. If you don’t agree, then you might be told you are a conspiracy theorist. (And of course, this matter could be made clearer if there were autopsises after these deaths, but no, there are none. Just as last year, when hospital admins wanted deaths labelled as COVID-related, even though the person died of a heart attack, injuries in a car accident etc. No autopsies may be performed that might prove what a hox the official story has been.)
I don’t know, but I’ve heard personally from people who claimed (months after the fact) to have had covid before covid came to America. As a certified and licensed armchair psychologist, I suppose I could make some guesses as to why. But I’ll refrain.
Breakthrough infections are always occurring. When whole populations of children are vaxxed for measles, there is a sudden explosion in measles cases.
When the big news headlines in Calif one spring played up how 33 children had come down with measles, thus sparking off an “epidemic,” eventually it was discovered all the cases of measles actually were of the vaccine variety, rather than the wild measles virus. (Of course the headlines were all about how this outbreak occurred due to the unvaxxed, even though in Calif only around 1.8% of children are not vaxxed.)
In the case of measles, sometimes the person getting the vaccine-based measles case was not vaccinated, but got infected through the shedding from a vaccinated person.
I don’t know how someone can have immunity to a virus that affects them if the exposure is through a vaccine.
Also, it has been stated, in recent weeks, even by some CDC officials, that the natural immunity a person has to COVID after experiencing it, that immunity is reduced by quite a bit if that individual gets the vaccine. And further reduced if the individual gets a second jab.
I can share my experience, where I claim that I “believe” I had covid around April/May 2020. Our Bookkeeper came in to work one week “coughing up a lung” claiming she felt she was going to die. We all strongly told her to go home, but she resisted.
Shortly thereafter, I came down with “something” that caused a chronic cough and other symptoms for almost 8 weeks. This was before testing was available.
I have not been poked, and am reluctant to do so. My coworker, a year younger at 62, was poked, twice and is home at the moment with a fairly significant case of breakthru covid. He and I quite social at work. We walk together each day for an hour, we discuss projects and life in each other’s offices. Since he has covid now, I surely was directly exposed to it by him last week. For me… nada.
I think I had covid already. No proof, but I think so. If you asked me I would “claim” I did.
Clifford:
Your calculations of what you call the “true immunization rate” appear to assume that none of the people vaccinated had previously had Covid. This seems unlikely. This would result in your calculation being an overstatement. Am I understanding this correctly?
On the other hand, it seems likely that some people had Covid without receiving a test confirmation. This would result in a higher rate of “true immunization,” though with the same problem of potentially double-counting people who both had Covid without knowing it and who also received a vaccine.
I hadn’t heard that. If that’s the case, I would be more inclined to get a booster. I had told Mrs R that I was hoping to hold off on the booster until there was one targeted at some of the variants.
I’m sometimes the last to learn of things. If anyone has an informative link about this “tweak,” I’d be interested.
I did find this AP article from mid April saying that the FDA had given approval to start testing the tweaked vaccine.
On the main point, about the Israeli study, this is an interesting result. Thanks, Clifford. I’m going to summarize the key points.
The authors performed three analyses, comparing subsequent Covid infection rates for: (1) vaccinated persons vs. persons who had Covid, adjusted so that the vaccination/infection occurred in the same time period; (2) vaccinated persons vs. persons who had Covid, with no restriction of time period; and (3) persons who had Covid vs. persons who both had Covid and had one vaccine booster.
The first analysis is the most significant, showing the largest difference between the protection provided by Covid infection compared to the protection provided by the vaccine. The second analysis showed a smaller effect, because without the restriction in time, those who had been infected had a longer average time period between infection/vaccination and the study time window (so some of the natural immunity might have worn off).
The first analysis showed that prior infection provided about 13 times as much protection as vaccination (point estimate 13.06, 95% CI 8.08-21.11).
The authors did not report on the low rates of infection among both groups, but provided data that allows this to be calculated. They selected 16,215 persons in each group, of whom about 1.5% of the vaccinated group (238 persons) had an infection in the study window, significantly higher than the 0.12% of the previously-infected group (19 persons). The unadjusted difference in these infection rates was about 12.5 times; the reported figure of 13 times is after adjusting for comorbidities.
Unfortunately, they provided no comparison to the unvaccinated. The percentage of vaccinated persons who had a subsequent infection was pretty low as an absolute number, 1.5%, but hard to assess whether this is good or not without a comparison to the unvaccinated.
This study does present solid evidence that actual infection provides greater protection than vaccination.
Without matching for time of infection/vaccination, prior infection provided about 6 times greater protection than vaccination. This suggests that the natural immunity fades over time, but they did not estimate the rate of the decline.
Another interesting result is that a single vaccine dose after prior infection provided a benefit, compared to prior infection alone. Those in the infection-plus-vaccine group had a 0.53 decreased risk of subsequent infection (i.e. they were 47% less likely to be infected again due to having the vaccine dose in addition to prior infection). The re-infection rate in both groups were very small: about 0.14% among those with prior infection and a single vaccine shot, 0.26% among those with prior infection but no vaccine shot.
Yes, in the American context, there is an overlap of vaccinated and previously infected, so there is some level of overcount. Likewise, we probably have many more naturally immunized through a bout of COVID.
I’m another such case. In February 2020, my daughter, who lives with me, was quite ill for three weeks with respiratory symptoms and kept complaining of a loss of smell and taste , and of feeling better, followed by a relapse. In the middle of this I awoke with a cough and laryngitis. I never really felt ill but experienced the improvement/relapse pattern. A physician in our family who treated COVID patients later thought that’s what we both had. A friend with some serious health issues who was traveling in Italy at that time also became ill with similar symptoms and later believed she did well because she takes hydroxychloroquine for lupus. By the way, I have read that it was Chinese doctors who first thought of HCQ as a treatment after noticing that people prescribed this drug, mostly lupus patients, were not coming in to the hospital with the virus.
Some people had similar symptoms and assumed it was the covid-19 virus.
A lot of people had symptoms so close they were amazed that the test came back negative. But that’s very possible given the nature of the testing and swabbing.
But it means there are probably a lot of false negatives out there. There are even lots of false positives–not all of them entirely negative but not infectious.
And there are the people who were sick with flu or the covid-19 virus in the December through March period when we had no tests at all yet. :-)
It’s been a mess. :-)
By the way, antibody tests are readily available, and they cost only about $50 through Quest Diagnostics and other labs.
I also have not found out whether the “booster” currently available is one that was tweaked. I see some people saying that Pfizer needs FDA approval before it can use it, and others saying it doesn’t. What is it currently using? No idea.
I don’t know either. I’ve been frustrated for weeks over this, the seeming blackout on information about the vaccines.
When the virus first became news, there was a period of about thirty seconds when it seemed to me that the entire world was working together sharing information. I actually enjoyed following it because (a) I have an interest in microbiology and (b) I didn’t have to disregard 95 percent of everything I read because it was biased somehow. :-)
There is nothing wrong with bias, if the individuals who may look biased to the casual observer are actually trying to get to the truth.
However, when the people running the show continually offer up contradictory & contra factual “guidance” which holds no relationship whatsoever to scientific proof, the type of bias they are guilty of is despicable. Why is it that Fauci has assidiously avoided any mention of the use of HCQ as treatment for COVID – even though he wells knows it is efficacious – he wrote a 2005 paper on HCQ combatting corona viruses. However so many decent drs saw the Truth: through developping a method of examining the inductive reason-based realizations which indicate quite clearly that in those nations where the actual remedies like HCQ and ivermectin were used, fatality rates were minimal until vaccination occurred.
It’s easy to understand that the people who have run this show, people whose bias is just as present as the truth seekers, have no interest in solutions at hand but are using their power to shift the blame that should fall on their shoulders and result in their demotions, impeachments from office, or actual indictments for murder, and put the blame on the “anti vaxxers” and the unvaccinated. Even worse, much worse they have allowed the doctors & other med personnel who have spoken out about those solution-based remedies that would have stopped COVID a full year ago and made them scapegoats. Meanwhile the effective COVID remedies have been withheld from most of us.
In 7 minutes, Dr Dan Stock nails the entire situation. Stock is a rare breed of American doctor, a doctor of functional medicine, which means his education has steered him away from thinking it is OK to mistake a symptom for a disease’s cause, and steered him away from then treating the symptom with either surgery, or vaccines.
Instead his education in functional medicine means he looks to the real cause and real remedies.
https://www.westandunited.cloud/videos/Dr-Daniel-Wayne-Stock-CSR-Physician-IN-010377358B-Covid-Testimony-2021aug6.mp4
Thanks for expanding the comment. It now makes sense to me.
I believe I had it or something exactly like it in January, 2020. However, I didn’t feel the need to be tested to verify that or use it as an excuse not to get the vaccine, which I got. For me, it just became a belief that it was here before we realized it and that China was guilty of its spread and of lying.
Yes, and that Fauci was guilty of its origin, spread, and of lying.
Good phrase!
They do not have to.
Training in “Functional medicine”-there is no residency training in quack medicine like functional medicine. Dr Stock was trained in family medicine-whose board refuses to recognize functional medicine. Stock makes numerous bizarre claims, like the vax is causing COVID etc. He is a quack like Mercola & Meehan and the other MDs you quote-many of whom are making money by selling bogus cures on the net to rubes who listen to people like you. Notice how none of the people you quote have worked in any infections disease field in the last decade.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2021/08/11/dan-stock-indiana-doctors-viral-mt-vernon-school-board-testimony-full-misinformation/5551476001/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/aafp-functional-medicine-lacks-supporting-evidence-includes-harmful-and-dangerous-treatments/
In Calif, a person is a functional medicine physician after completing med school, and residency and then adding an additional two years of training to their knowledge base. This wasn’t possible 40 years ago, but it is now.
The focus for this physician is to not see a symptom as a cause, and then treat the symptom. (Which accomplishes nothing and usually has disastrous results.) They work on getting to the real causal factor & Treating that. Also there is tradition-based and experience-based methods of evaluating situations. It means a great deal to a doctor from the functional school of medicine that nations across the globe that used HCQ protocols, ivermectin, high dose c and D and zinc had super low fatality rates. While Rockefeller Institute-schooled doctors call that anecdotal.
@mimac
I do not think I have ever quoted Mercola. But I did point out his vast popularity. (It is possible you were thinking of another ricochet member who is a big Mercola fan.)
Okay functional medicine: the key word these days is “naturopathic doctor.” Again, in Calif, such doctors have done full med school, full residency and an additional 2 years. The top organization that has a directory of these drs in Calif is here: https://www.calnd.org/
So you are wrong that there is no training for this.
Why are doctors schooled in functional aspects important? My own example is the case I had of diverticulitis. I had incredible stomach pain after being on antibiotics some weeks earlier. My doctor at Kaiser first spent weeks ruling out cancer. Then and only then did the diagnosis become diverticulitis. But by then my hemacratic numbers were in the toilet. The recommended surgery was put off in the hopes I would recover over a 6 to 8 week period and become strong enough to survive the surgery.
So while waiting for the surgery, I discovered that acidophilus might actually boost up the healthy flora in my gut, doing in the diverticuli without surgery and restoring me to health. Had I gone to a naturopathic dr to begin with, I would have avoided weeks of testing, a colonoscopy and the huge expense of other cancer screenings and tests. (At least my insurance covered all of that.)
By then, I had seen several Kaiser drs, who had all agreed my div. case was the worst they had seen. Yet one bottle of Jarrow’s acidophilus & life was worth living in 3 days & I was back to working & having my social life back at the 6 week mark.
So my impression differs from yours: I see at least in my case that nutritionists and naturopaths cost less than the Ca-ching oriented Rockefeller-institute types. (Oh & I left out the part that some diverticulitis surgery patients must wear a colostomy bag for the rest of their lives! Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!!!! on a daily basis!)
Also none of the “normal” doctors mentioned that after the surgery, the diverticuli could come back and surgery would be repeated.
I detailed in one of the pieces I wrote just about a year ago the incredible control over the media, almost all American media, by Bill Gates. (So for that reason not interested in reading your offered newspaper links to a junk analysis of Dan Stock.) That piece I wrote was based on Aug 2020 The Columbia Journalism Review’s article of Gates donating monies to “indie” media outlets like The BBC and NPR. Please note: Since then I have come to find out Gates outright invests in many various media outlets, including CNN, Gannet, and probably half of the 6 major news orgs up and running in the USA! (The piece I wrote is at ricochet/members/CarolJoy – late Aug or else Sept 2020)