vaccinating the recovered

endlessly pushing ideas of reward without assessing risk is not medicine, it's marketing

much has been made of late of this idea that even those who have had covid and recovered should be getting at least one dose of vaccination or even a full course.

this is based off deeply flawed, non-randomized, not properly controlled, completely retrospective studies. this makes the efficacy of this plan murky at best and likely complete GIGO.

but this is not even relevant for even if we take these studies at face value and grant that you can drop risk of contracting covid by >50% by vaccinating a recovered person, still it does not matter because the baseline risk of re-infection is so low that it cannot possibly pass a risk/reward screen.

perhaps this is why those endlessly pushing vaccines speak only of reward and never seem to mention risk.

that’s not how this works.

all medical decisions are everywhere and always a risk/benefit decision.

ignoring the risk side as though benefits are the only factor to consider is medical malpractice.

let’s look:

this is one of the key STUDIES used to validate this idea and it was amplified HERE by the CDC. (quote from CDC)

In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.

“If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “This study shows you are twice as likely to get infected again if you are unvaccinated. Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country.”

everything about this statement is misleading, slanted, and incomplete. “more than twice the rate of reinfection” sounds scary, but isn’t because the overall chance of getting re-infected so low already that reducing it makes little practical difference.

worse, the study cannot really show what it purports to because, like so many of the CDC’s claims this year, it’s based on an irretrievably bad study design.

this was not cohorted or randomized. it was not even prospective. they picked a bunch of people who had had covid and then tested positive for covid again out of a database. there was no symptomatic confirm or any other validation. we have no idea if they were even clinically sick, and most probably were not.

control were just “people who had covid and then were not re-infected.” they picked this group out of a hat. there’s no matching for comorbidities etc that played such a massive role here and those that had them were more likely to get re-infected because that maps to weak immune systems. the selection bias on that alone almost certainly invalidates any study claims.

they then back screened for vaccination status.

this is a garbage methodology so riddled with confounds as to render a result this minor moot, especially in an N this small (240 cases vs 492 control). (less than 1/10th of 1% of all previous cases were re-infected. this is well within even just the error on the test.)

we have no idea what relative testing rates were (and the vaxxed are excused from testing in many, many situations where the unvaxxed are not around schools, travel, jobs, etc)

they also ignored the high vulnerability window between dose 1 and 2 that has shown negative 50-100% protection (infection more likely) in several studies. those all got lumped into “unvaxxed” or excluded. danish and swedish studies linked here, danish data shown:

this is a serious issue to leave out of a study. nobody gets to be dose 2 + 14 days without passing through days 1-7 post dose 1. you need to add this to the vaccinated cohort to get a real sense of risk. failing to do so is incomplete and dishonest risk accounting. (it’s also how nearly every study is being reported)

so, this study is tiny in size and unreliable in methodology. this is, frankly, junk, and for the CDC to be basing policy prescriptions on it is well past unsound. it’s outrageous.

but hey, don’t take my word for it. the authors of the study agree with me.

but clearly, the CDC is not going to let that stop them. they’ve been using studies as bad or worse than this push various polices all year.

but what’s worse is that they are not discussing risks.

at all.

so let’s look at what they are:

getting dosed with these vaccines carries real risk. the side effect profiles are FAR beyond any other approved vaccine in widespread use.

people are talking about this study dropping infection from 0.09% to 0.04% from vaccine and getting there using CDC case counts for reference period. i’m not confident in this methodology and cannot replicate it in a manner that does not look at least partially circular to me as we do not know how many people were vaccinated during the 2 month study period.

so instead, let’s stack the deck for pro vax and use this more dangerous looking re-infection data (over a year, not 2 months). it’s 0.31%.

and let’s assume the same 2.34 risk ratio from kentucky.

so the payoff is 0.178%. 178 “cases” per 100,000 avoided.

here’s the price:

even among the young who are lower risk, these vaccines have a greater than 1% hospitalization rate for a full course. it’s 0.7% for dose 2. let’s just use that, because dose 2 is what a recovered person would likely experience from first administration.

700 per 100,000. so, already, were WAY off the reservation on risk reward. it jumps to more like 1,200 to 1,300 if we demand 2 doses.

who would trade a drop of 178 positive PCR tests that do not even have symptomatic confirmation for 700 hospitalizations alone, much less another 25,700 people unable to do normal daily activities and 16,700 unable to work? (or worse with two doses)

as you can impute from the data below, the pfizer 6 month follow up was 500 and possibly as many as 1,191 additional severe adverse events per 100k.

even if we haircut this for only having one dose, it’s going to be awfully hard to bring into line with “prevented 178 positive tests that were probably mostly asymptomatic or very mild.”

this is, frankly, a disaster. the risk reward here, especially if you are young and healthy is terrible. but then, we already knew that. these vaccines have always had deeply negative risk reward for the young and healthy.

they have negative risk reward for nearly all healthy people under 50-60. the pfizer interim data shows this clearly because while rigging their study to look effective, they used such healthy people (79% had zero comorbidity) that they wound up with more overall deaths in their treatment arm than in control.

• overall, vaccinating 22k people stopped 29 severe cases of covid and perhaps 2 deaths, though it may likely have caused more deaths from reactions than it stopped from covid.

• this was at the expense of maybe 4000 extra related adverse events, at least 110 of them severe. so you have a 110 severe AE cost to 29 severe covid savings. this could easily be 262 to 29 if we rule out the alleged “severe reactions” to saline injections that are claimed. (this seems a suspicious claim)

these vaccines may look good for the high risk (ask your doctor. have a data driven conversation.) but they have never looked good for healthy people.

and the efficacy of vaccines is rapidly waning and even topol is agreeing.

and the vaxx mandate trend toward forcing the recovered to get a full two dose course of vaccine may actually reduce their overall immunity. pretty hard to argue in favor of that...

so, this idea that the recovered ought to get vaccinated looks unsupportable even if you use the most charitable assumptions we can find.

it’s off by gigantic margins and covid vaccines do not provide sterilizing immunity so this is not some “do it for society” situation. demanding people engage in self harm to act as your human shield is neither valid medical advice nor valid morality, especially when the shield does not even work.

we’re asking people who have tiny risk of likely asymptomatic or barely symptomatic reinfection to take a risk that is orders of magnitude greater from the vaccine.

that’s not medicine, that’s marketing (and dishonest marketing at that) and it has no place whatsoever in CDC pronouncements.

endlessly peddling benefit without discussing risk is flat out charlatanry and anyone pushing only one side of that equation is not a doctor, they’re a snake oil salesman.

every time i think i cannot be more horrified by the misbehavior and blatant malpractice of these “experts” turned pharma pitchmen, they manage to drop a gear and find still lower depths to which to sink.

it’s time these people were run out of town on a rail. whatever it is these carnival barkers are selling, it’s not “public health.”

get the information, consult a a health expert you trust, make the choice that’s right for you. being hectored into self-harm because you didn’t is not the way you want to go.