Vexing Vax Performance Puzzles

 

justice and COVID-19Bloomberg 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Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.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.

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections

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
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  1. Gazpacho Grande' Coolidge
    Gazpacho Grande'
    @ChrisCampion

    Roderic (View Comment):

    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.

    Those things are on the margin.  And he’s not talking about the margins here, it’s the presentation of the data.

    As Dr. Jay said, everyone is going to get covid at some point.  Which still makes immunization OK, as it will likely mitigate the impacts at all age demographics, but it’s definitely something you’d want to see high participation in, for the at-risk groups.

    What the above blows up a bit is the garbage argument that the vaccines provide better protection against the virus than if you had Covid and survived, the normal natural immunity.  Which many people have been arguing the wrong side of as justification to make sure Pfizer’s gigantic revenue machine continues its Long March, er, the government will continue to demonstrate it has control over every aspect of our lives, er, that we’re all just super-healthy thanks to a consistently self-contradicting and historically failed Fauci.

     

    • #31
  2. Gazpacho Grande' Coolidge
    Gazpacho Grande'
    @ChrisCampion

    DonG (2+2=5. Say it!) (View Comment):

    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.

    Accurate.  They haven’t spent any of those billions on the primary charge of the organization, which is to evaluate those types of public health solutions – all of them.  So nothing on the Ivermectins, the z-paks, etc, 

    Why?  Because it gores their bull.  Why promote a $1 solution when the provider’s is $10?

    The entire event is a colossal demonstration of why handing off this level of control over our lives is ever and always a bad idea, not without some kind of check and balance against it – which is why, I thought, we bothered to elect Representatives to Congress.  When those people are primarily motivated to be re-elected, can receive campaign help from Pfizer, indirectly or not, what do you think they’ll choose to do?

    It’s no different from going along with multi-trillion dollar budgets, with close to half of that spending done through borrowing.  What do they care?  Those budgets equal votes.  

    We will continue to get more of the same.

    • #32
  3. Gazpacho Grande' Coolidge
    Gazpacho Grande'
    @ChrisCampion

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    Rodin (View Comment):

    Phil Turmel (View Comment):

    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. /:

    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.

    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.

    Accurate, all of the above.  The breakthroughs are even more likely to occur since typically you vaccinate ahead of the pandemic, or in a normal year, something we call “flu season”.  Vaccinating during the event will only trigger faster variations that may or may not be as affected by the vaccine, so you’ll get “breakthroughs” based on the current state of events.  Lots of ’em.

    It’s no different than the annual flu vaccination approach (although the mRNA approach for Covid is a larger topic), the likeliest strain is used to create the vaccine, but may not have the same effect on the inevitable variations that occur, since it’s a best guess ahead of the season.

    • #33
  4. Gazpacho Grande' Coolidge
    Gazpacho Grande'
    @ChrisCampion

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    @ mimac

    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)

    Agree 100%.  Batting aside functional medicine is ignoring reality.

    • #34
  5. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    MarciN (View Comment):

    [Snip] there was a period of about thirty seconds when it seemed to me that the entire world was working together sharing information. 

    “There was a period of about thirty seconds” sent me instantly to day dreams about half-life and exponential decay.  

    • #35
  6. JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery Coolidge
    JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery
    @JosePluma

    TempTime (View Comment):

    Roderic (View Comment):
    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.

    I can’t say why, but patients claim they have the Wuhan Virus, but were never tested.  One patient said that they had recovered from the virus four times.

    • #36
  7. Rodin Member
    Rodin
    @Rodin

    JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery (View Comment):

    TempTime (View Comment):

    Roderic (View Comment):
    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.

    I can’t say why, but patients claim they have the Wuhan Virus, but were never tested. One patient said that they had recovered from the virus four times.

    Yeah, you’d think after the third bout the antibodies might stop a fourth.

    • #37
  8. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    JosePluma, Local Man of Mystery (View Comment):

    TempTime (View Comment):

    Roderic (View Comment):
    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.

    I can’t say why, but patients claim they have the Wuhan Virus, but were never tested. One patient said that they had recovered from the virus four times.

    I understand that in Europe, an infection plus one dose of vaccine counts as “fully vaccinated.”  (This may vary by country; I’m not sure.) However, an infection that was not accompanied by a positive PCR test doesn’t count.  

    • #38
  9. Roderic Coolidge
    Roderic
    @rhfabian

    TempTime (View Comment):

    Roderic (View Comment):
    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.

    In order to claim they don’t need the vaccine.

    • #39
  10. Roderic Coolidge
    Roderic
    @rhfabian

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):
    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.

    Their actions need to be able to stand up to court challenge.  If they go against experts they’d better have a much better reason for it than, “I thought I knew better,”  especially since they themselves most likely hired the experts.  (Too many betters there, but my thesaurus is down.)

    • #40
  11. DrewInWisconsin, Oaf Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oaf
    @DrewInWisconsin

    Roderic (View Comment):

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):
    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.

    Their actions need to be able to stand up to court challenge. If they go against experts they’d better have a much better reason for it than, “I thought I knew better,” especially since they themselves most likely hired the experts. (Too many betters there, but my thesaurus is down.)

    None of the “experts” have “expertise” in anything except being bureaucrats.

     

    • #41
  12. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Roderic (View Comment):

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):
    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.

    Their actions need to be able to stand up to court challenge. If they go against experts they’d better have a much better reason for it than, “I thought I knew better,” especially since they themselves most likely hired the experts. (Too many betters there, but my thesaurus is down.)

    That doesn’t make sense.  Experts aren’t there to tell governors what to do. They are there to advise them on the consequences of various alternatives.  Experts have narrow interests. Political governors have to consider wider interests.  Experts should never, ever be in charge of policy.  

    • #42
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