Relics of the past

At some point one has to wonder whether The Science™ moves too slow to deal with novelty, or if the narrative’s veil is being shrouded over reality. Reading through the journal articles these days begs the simple question — “so what”? If, for example, a person were to open up the front page article on NEJM and take the article at face value, then they would draw completely different conclusions than if they had read the same article in the summer of last year. You know, when the observational data the study uses was actually collected.

The article in a nutshell is looking at how long it takes for immunity to wane in those who were vaccinated and those who were recovered from COVID-19. Noticeably, the never tested positive never vaccinated cohort were not included in the study. Here’s the rub — the study, which uses data prior to most vaccine passport schemes, clearly shows that natural immunity is better than vaccines in every possible way.

Natural immunity is better in every possible way.

We knew that, of course, at the time, but public health officials, even with all this data at their fingertips, continually lied to us. The fact that this study took almost a year is pathetic. In reality, depending on the data structure, it would have taken a skeptic like me hours, maybe days, but certainly less than a week to clean the data in R. Analyzing the data and writing up a similar report to theirs would be even quicker — and the structure of the report would be less misleading. It is not hard.

The reason the report took so long, though, is because the natural conclusion from looking at the results of the study can only, and even must be, that vaccine passports were and still are immoral when there is no feasible way of knowing who has been infected with the virus on a grand scale.

Again, while the never tested positive never vaccinated cohort was not shown here, the study shows rapidly waning immunity in every person not infected. Immunity in those infected also waned, but even the authors of the study admit that much of this was likely due to the novelty of new variants.

Ironically, any existing protection from vaccines during the delta wave, which I have always been on the record did exist, just at much lower rates than public health officials were representing, no longer exists. So measuring the time until immunity wanes in a vaccine that no longer exists is irrelevant. So what. Yes, it waned for an extinct variant, but once omicron came along, it did not wane because it never existed.

See the graph below originally posted here.

Notice, in the above graph, the first few days are marked by the well understood healthy vaccine effect, in other words, people who are sick do not get vaccinated, then we see that… immunity is simply never gained. The only reason the cases drop down at the end is because almost no one in that cohort had been vaccinated long enough to get infected. That is not a sign of waning immunity. It is a sign of never acquired immunity.

This study should have been framed as an apology.

An apology for all the times we were called conspiracy theorists for pointing out quickly waning immunity, the need for endless boosters, and the fact that natural immunity is/was superior to vaccination. Instead, it will be used to convey the advantages of what they call “hybrid immunity”, which is getting vaccinated and being infected anyway, or being infected and getting vaccinated anyway.

In either case, the study shows nothing of the sort, but the way the data is laid out suggests as much because the researchers selectively included cohorts in different time frames and put the data far enough away to confuse the public.

Check out this graph from the study.

Note the time since last event column. If the authors had shown time since last event for each cohort on one visual, it would become clearer what is happening.

If we were to compare those with natural immunity (14 infections per 100k) to the double vaccinated (88.9 infections per 100k) at, say, 6-8 months, then we could say natural immunity effectiveness is 84.25%**. Or likely a lot better than the vaccine performed against the never infected never vaccinated (unobserved) in the same time period (in the 6-8 month time period, the vaccine may have been crossing the negative effectiveness threshold… I wonder if that is why the never infected, never vaccinated cohort was dropped from the study).

** keep in mind this is an underestimate of how mucu better natural immunity is than vaccination as some people in the vaccinated cohort are misclassified and are actually benefitting from natural immunity themselves

By the vaccine passport logic, anyone who had not been infected with the virus should have been cast out from society until they could present proof of an infection!

Here are the rates per 100k of the only two comparable time frames the authors decided to include, but placed beside each other:

YIKES!

There is actually no evidence here that the vaccine provides any benefit for someone with natural immunity. In fact, in the 6-8 month cohort, though the recovered, one-dose cohort is lower than the recovered, unvaccinated cohort, it is not a statistically different significance. Interestingly, the cohort of people that got vaccinated after being infected is statistically different than those who were infected first in that time frame.

Why?

That’s an important question. It may be a random event, and perhaps if we measured out further, the difference would disappear. But it could also be that those who got vaccinated before being infected are having their natural immunity slowly wiped out by the vaccine. That’s, obviously, idle speculation. Maybe if these data sets were released in full we’d need to do less idle speculation, but at least it would not take nearly a year for a study like this to come out…