natural immunity outperforms vaccinated AND vaccinated and recovered

now published in NEJM, and the data has almost certainly gotten worse from here

times are changing.

when this study (now published in new england journal of medicine (NEJM)) came out as a preprint it was fascinating but many argued that no one would really publish it.

now, it seems, even top journals are letting truth leak out.

despite a number of shabby graphical tricks played to make it look less damning to vaccinated immunity, the data from this large (5.7 million people) study in the the israeli data (some of, if not the highest quality society scale data on extant) was extremely clear: those who were unvaxxed and recovered had far better immunity than the vaccinated.

this was my take in dec 2021.

you can see the whole analysis here:

graphical deception (and a smoking gun for OAS?)

i am reposting this study for several reasons:

1. it remains highly relevant and not many people saw it.

2. many claimed this would never get published, but instead, it’s now out in the NEJM, one of the most prestigious medical journals on earth

3. there is some new info both in the study and with which it may be combined combined meaningfully and i’d like to pull some threads together especially as this study ended in oct 2021, before the emergence of omicron which is a far more optimized OAS/vaccine escape variant

4. there seems to be a renewed push out of CDC and others for “vaccination reduces covid spread and outperforms acquired immunity” and this is 180 degrees, catastrophically wrong.

first off, let’s examine the study period and population behaviors within it as this is highly relevant. this graphic from the study really lays it out:

the gray shaded area is the study period: aug-oct 2021.

this was delta, not omicron as prevalent variant. numerous important issues arise here:

1. the size of unvaxxed was dropping rapidly toward the end. their exposure days are front loaded

2. boosters only emerged right at the end and only counted at booster +12 days (a now familiar form of bayesian rigging for covid vaccine studies to shift the immuno-suppression of the vaccine to other groups or to define it out of existence) so their exposure days are highly back end loaded

3. covid was dropping in incidence late in this study and rising early. this would seem to favor the vaxxed overall in terms of incidence as overall prevalence was not controlled for.

but still, we got this: (be careful to be sure you align the timeframes, they vary greatly by cohort)

comparable info can be seen here in a graphic i made:

clear takeaways from this data:

even at 0-2 months, double dosed had twice the case rate that unvaxxed and recovered had at 4-6 months. by 4-6 months, the rate was nearly 7X.

further, the rate of collapse of immunity among the double dosed far exceeds that of acquired immunity which looks to have more or less stabilized after 10 months (though more data would be useful here)

we have very little booster data, only 0-2 months and we have no comparison set for recovered and unvaxxed and we’re dealing with serious bayesian rigging from only counting as boosted those 12 days post boost, but even so, 8.2 per 100k at 0-2 months is barely better than recovered at 4-6 months (10.5). if (and this is now extrapolation but fits with other data and is actually likely conservative) boosted immunity degrades like double dosed, we would expect case counts to rise by 3.1X by 4-6 mo, so we get 25.4, more than 2.5X the rate in the recovered.

the evidence here favors the recovered over the vaxxed very strongly.

and it is likely significantly under-estimating the difference as the performance of the vaccines has been degrading rapidly as their leaky nature selects for escape and vaccine advantaged variants such as omicron.

we see this clearly in UK data (omi hit ~wk52 2021-wk1 2022)

we can also see how the statcrime around counting triple dosed post time of dosing had a brief 1-2 month suppressive effect but that boosters rapidly began to underperform what double dosed was getting.

it’s, at best, an ephemeral gain and quietly likely a mostly false one conjured from definitional shenanigans and not efficacy.

and even with this, the vaxxed are getting ~4X the covid of the unvaxxed even when we control for age cohort)

(full run through below)

covid is becoming increasingly vaccine enabled

the US data claiming otherwise is essentially GIGO. UK and isreal are far higher quality datasets. the US is using outdated census data to make the unvaxxed group look smaller than it is and playing games with the EPIC health records many of which are not carrying vaxx status in a searchable filed (instead in “notes”) and thus many who are vaxxed show up as unvaxxed in those records. the CDC and other US organizations (NY city/state in particular) seem to be playing some very aggressive games with their counting and i find their data to be completely unreliable and strongly at odds, especially on severity among the old, with the society scale data.

whether the unseasonable spike in covid hospitalization in the US NE has peaked for the moment is a bit up in the air as the data reports real day of incidence and thus can take a week or so to finish filling in. regardless, we saw a large rise in hospitalization in the most highly vaxxed and it’s getting harder and harder to claim it’s just “hospitalization with” and not “for.”

NH eliminated that definition entirely (others seem to be following suit) and now counts only those with serious or severe covid being treated with covid specific drugs. this switch caused their over 70’s hospitalization to plateau for a couple weeks, but it then took off again.

it’s 2.7X what it was last year and has been rising when it ought be dropping. at the very least, this is highly provocative.

the evidence is becoming awfully hard to ignore: the odds on best is that this is because of antigenic fixation.

we’ve seen the direct biological manifestation in terms of inability to generate N antibodies, even post exposure to actual covid. this inhibits the generation of durable, sterilizing immunity. in fact, it prevents it. astonishingly, this was known from the original drug trials on the mRNA vaccines. but this information was not released. that is a breathtaking lapse in judgement and duty. it amounts to outright medical and regulatory malpractice.

there is only one, utterly predictable way that this kind of fixation, suppression, and non-sterilizing immunity goes because it’s just evolutionary selection. it goes here:

second, third, fourth rounds of covid in vaxxed and double boosted. over and over. endless spread because you’re now a carrier that lacks the ability to generate a potent sterilizing immune response. rapid new emergence of optimized variants.

the misinformation about attenuating spread and severity has a real price. it keeps people going back for more of a product that’s generating net harm. this is cognitive dissonance cum virtue signaling you could stand a spoon in.

(thanks to longtime gatopal™ @voluntary_nay whose screenshots i used in this quilt)

but it’s been obvious since even before omi that boosters were underperforming unvaxxed.

and post omi, it’s been blatant. the double dosed underperform the unvaxxed and the triple dosed underperform the double time for time (from US walgreens data). it’s just harm being piled upon harm to create a treadmill of health risk.

this policy has been a disaster. these vaccines appear to have, at one point, been somewhat useful at reducing severity, but they have never really suppressed spread and rapidly flipped to accelerate it. they now appear to be falling apart on severity, possibly worsening it especially in those with poor general immune response such as the old, driving antigenic fixation, and preventing development of functional herd immunity/resistance.

the likelihood that they are doing far more harm than good appears quite high especially given the high side effect profiles and the lack of any evidence of reduction in all cause mortality even from the studies on which they were approved. (and those studies look increasingly dodgy and possibly outright fraudulent)

what has passed as public health for the last two yeas has been surreally slipshod and predatory and the ongoing tales of “this worked and you should keep doing it” are just driving us deeper into danger

we cannot live here anymore.