A paper, which was on the internet as a pre-print, has now been published in the world’s leading medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, no doubt causing much heart-burn to the medico-Big Pharma establishment. The short and sweet message is one that we have known right from the beginning, that natural immunity is superior to vaccination, and outperforms it. As expected, the argument has statistical complexities, explained below for those wanting the fine details, but the message is again clear that natural immunity for healthy people, such as children, rather than the vax, is the way to go. It is a significant turning point that even a small part of the mainstream is now reluctantly admitting that natural immunity to Covid yields longer protection than all the vaccines, where (debatable) protection wanes rapidly.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/natural-immunity-outperforms-vaccinated?s=r

“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.

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 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:

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 riggingfor 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)

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).”

https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2118946?articleTools=true

Protection and Waning of Natural and Hybrid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Yair Goldberg, Ph.D., Micha Mandel, Ph.D., Yinon M. Bar-On, M.Sc., Omri Bodenheimer, M.Sc., Laurence S. Freedman, Ph.D., Nachman Ash, M.D., Sharon Alroy-Preis, M.D., Amit Huppert, Ph.D., and Ron Milo, Ph.D.

BACKGROUND Infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) provides natural immunity against reinfection. Recent studies have shown waning of the immunity provided by the BNT162b2 vaccine. The time course of natural and hybrid immunity is unknown. METHODS Using the Israeli Ministry of Health database, we extracted data for August and September 2021, when the B.1.617.2 (delta) variant was predominant, on all persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who had received coronavirus 2019 vaccine. We used Poisson regression with adjustment for confounding factors to compare the rates of infection as a function of time since the last immunity-conferring event. RESULTS The number of cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection per 100,000 person-days at risk (adjusted rate) increased with the time that had elapsed since vaccination with BNT162b2 or since previous infection. Among unvaccinated persons who had recovered from infection, this rate increased from 10.5 among those who had been infected 4 to less than 6 months previously to 30.2 among those who had been infected 1 year or more previously. Among persons who had received a single dose of vaccine after previous infection, the adjusted rate was low (3.7) among those who had been vaccinated less than 2 months previously but increased to 11.6 among those who had been vaccinated at least 6 months previously. Among previously uninfected persons who had received two doses of vaccine, the adjusted rate increased from 21.1 among those who had been vaccinated less than 2 months previously to 88.9 among those who had been vaccinated at least 6 months previously. CONCLUSIONS Among persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 (regardless of whether they had received any dose of vaccine or whether they had received one dose before or after infection), protection against reinfection decreased as the time increased since the last immunity-conferring event; however, this protection was higher than that conferred after the same time had elapsed since receipt of a second dose of vaccine among previously uninfected persons. A single dose of vaccine after infection reinforced protection against reinfection.”