"natural" immunity from recovery outperforms vaccinated immunity in covid-19

trust the clinical outcomes data, not supposition about biomarkers

cliff notes:

• clinical outcomes data is a much stronger form of evidence than biomarker proxies

• the clinical outcomes studies show natural acquired immunity from recovery outperforming vaccinated immunity by a wide margin

• the studies claiming vaccinated immunity is superior to natural are based in biomarker proxies that have not been proven to correlate to outcomes

• therefore, the evidence for natural immunity exceeding vaccinated is by far the stronger

discussion:

there seems to be a recent spate of folks trying to claim that vaccinated immunity efficacy exceeds that of immunity gained by having had covid and recovering.

this would be an extremely surprising result. we do not vaccinate because it’s more effective, we do it because it’s less effective but less dangerous. that is the baseline assumption in any vaccine campaign. you’re using an attenuated version of the virus (or, in the case of MRNA a protein to act as a viral proxy) to train the immune system. there is no reason to ever presume it would do a better job of this than actual virus. the base case assumption would always be that natural immunity is stronger.

that’s what makes claims like this so puzzling:

this flies in the face of all expectation. such an exceptional claim would seem to require exceptional evidence, but upon examination this evidence is lacking. the entire basis for this line of reasoning resides in a weak and assumptive form of data from poorly controlled and conceived experiments. it’s all proxy data, not hard clinical data.

doctor tom is referring in this case to this specific STUDY. it has a great many flaws and could, even at best, provide only weak and presumptive evidence. it seeks to measure the seroprevalance of covid antibodies and the intensity of their expression. it notes higher levels of antibodies in those vaccinated.

this sounds like “efficacy” but it’s not. it could well be a sign that vaccines are triggering over-response and doing needless harm. if you need a liter of water to hydrate, drinking 10 is not a better plan.

it also mistakes provoked levels of response for immune memory through b-cells and t-cells. it’s not like your body keeps your system flooded with every antibody it knows how to make at all times. that would be both wasteful and harmful. instead, it keeps the recipe and makes them again if needed.

that and the polyglot nature of response to SARSCOV-2 through a variety of immune channels renders this line of analysis irretrievably flawed. there are simply too many scenarios here to know what one is looking at. there is no proof here. it’s all assumption that this biomarker is meaningful, predictive of future infection, and that it will persist over any sort of meaningful timeframe.

this is the vaccination equivalent of those mechanistic mask studies that measure droplets at 6 foot range in one, narrow, straight ahead line and ignore all the air leaking around the sides, aerosols, and the fact that no clinical outcomes RCT validates this assumption. the CDC even SAID SO.

and this is exactly why one cannot trust mere mechanistic and biomarker studies. they provide only a tiny part of a complex picture.

what we need is real, clinical outcomes data. fortunately, we have it.

i spoke earlier about the cleveland clinic data that shows that natural immunity outperformed vaccinated immunity among their staff.

we also now have new data from israel and it’s even more compelling in this regard.

reinfection rates for both are low (though not annualized) but the rate of re-infection for those who had recovered was 85% lower than those who had been vaccinated. (6.72 to 1 outperformance)

this is real clinical outcomes data. it’s what actually happened, not a marker that might affect this outcome. it’s data, not an input to data.

thus, it is FAR higher quality evidence as it measures the thing with which we are concerned, not some proxy for it of unknown correlation such as IgG serum levels.

every clinical outcomes study i have seen shows natural immunity outperforming vaccinated immunity.

every study i have seen claiming vaccination provides superior inoculation is based on some sort of proxy data.

this makes it very clear that the strong evidence favors natural immunity as the stronger form of acquired resistance.

at risk levels this low, there is no compelling claim that those who have recovered from covid should be vaccinated. that’s all risk, no reward and cannot pass a cost/benefit test.

whether you should consider vaccination is a personal choice based on your risk level and needs. heck, all medicine is (or at least it should be).

making good choices requires good data.

the relentless pushing of a “vaccination uber alles” narrative is unhelpful. it’s dishonest, clouds decision making, and erodes trust in public health figures.

if you lie to people over and over, they’re not going to trust you and these merchants of mendacity have overplayed their cronyistic hands too many times. the root of “vaccine hesitancy” is “officials lying to the public.” doubling and tripling down on this message is just going to make it worse. it’ll fireball into streisand effect.

they need to stop.

they need to remember what medicine is supposed to be and cease pushing politics by proxy and snout in trough crony capitalism instead of public health.

we need dialogue and data, not deviousness and diktat.

there is a reason memes like this have gained such currency.

it is not because “public health figures have behaved well.”