COVID and natural immunity
Now it can be told, apparently:
Immunity acquired from a Covid infection provides strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness, according to research published Thursday in The Lancet — protection, experts say, that’s on par with what’s provided through two doses of an mRNA vaccine.
Infection-acquired immunity cut the risk of hospitalization and death from a Covid reinfection by 88% for at least 10 months, the study found.
Almost from the start of the pandemic, one of the troubling things authorities were doing was ignoring the probably protective role of natural immunity. Their attitude never made a particle of logical sense; it always seemed as though they were pushing vaccines at the expense of logic. Why should the COVID virus act so differently from other viruses, which tend to cause some sort of immunity (or relative immunity)in those who contract the disease naturally? COVID shouldn’t act differently, and apparently it doesn’t act differently.
And even though I wrote “now it can be told,” it’s certainly not the first time the news has come out. For example:
What readers may not recall is that earlier published studies reached the same conclusion, as far back as September 2021. Ron DeSantis drew a fact-check from the Tampa Bay Times for citing an Israeli study that concluded the same thing — and in fact found naturally acquired immunity to be stronger “>and longer-lasting than vaccination.
Speaking of natural immunity, I just came across this post I wrote in the early COVID days, back in mid-March of 2020. Here are some excerpts:
Wouldn’t it be better to have only high-risk people stay home? People over 60 and those with pre-existing conditions? That way, if all those at low risk kept mingling, a lot of them would get a mild flu and herd immunity will be achieved fairly quickly, to the benefit of all, without overwhelming the health care system…
I just don’t see the end game for the current mitigation strategies. Wouldn’t we still get an overwhelmed health care system when everyone emerges?…
I was looking at a spate of recent articles on how Philadelphia and St. Louis handled the flu differently in 1918, with Philadelphia holding a big war bond parade despite the fact that the flu was beginning to make inroads in the city, and St. Louis canceling public gatherings (see this for just one example). The Philadelphia death rate soared and that of St. Louis did not.
However, most of the articles don’t mention this depressing fact:
“According to a 2007 analysis of Spanish flu death records, the peak mortality rate in St. Louis was only one-eighth of Philadelphia’s death rate at its worst. That’s not to say that St. Louis survived the epidemic unharmed. Dehner says the midwestern city was hit particularly hard by the third wave of the Spanish flu which returned in the late winter and spring of 1919.”
So, St. Louis did flatten its curve. But the deaths stretched out longer there.
And this apparently was a common occurrence in many cities:
“If St. Louis had waited another week or two, they might have fared the same as Philadelphia, says the lead author on the first study, Richard Hatchett, M.D., an associate director for emergency preparedness at NIAID. Despite the fact that these cities had dramatically different outcomes early on, all the cities in the survey ultimately experienced significant epidemics because, in the absence of an effective vaccine, the virus continued to spread or recurred as cities relaxed their restrictions.”
So many things were already known and ignored, including natural immunity, and the relative inadequacy of mitigation efforts to stave off a pandemic’s effects.
Seen elsewhere:
The authorities are telling people that the air in East Palestine is perfectly fine to breath, while at the same time telling them that a piece of cloth will protect them from an airborne flu virus.
This was an early question of mine: Flattening the curve reduces the height of the peak, but does it reduce the area under the curve? That is, what it the net number of seriously sick people or deaths over the long term, and is it reduced?
Probably not. One could legitimately argue that the extreme overwhelming of the hospital system with a high peak, will lead to needless deaths. My feeling was the the original 15 days to flatten the curve could have been extended another 10 days or so followed by an absolute end to it.
Lots of interesting comments from your link to the March 17, 2020 post provided here.
Many nailed the problems very early on and a few were far too naive in thinking this would all blow over quickly.
I like reading these links back to March 2020 because they really identify who was rational and who was hysterical and to their great credit most of the commenters here were pretty rational.
So proud of myself! I commented on that thread that by the end of March (2020) older people like me should stay home and everyone else who had no serious health problems should go back to normal life. I believe the nation would have been far better off if we had done that.
We all are forgetting that the most likely explanation for all the “incompetence” was that the D/left saw the virus as the perfect opportunity to take down Trump. And boy, did they do a good job! So what some people were killed and the economy ruined along the way.
Given that China most likely developed the virus and once it was out, either by design or a leak, they then let infected people fly all over…seems quite deliberate. And then add in the actions of Fauci, and all the blue guv’s and mayors and it all adds up to me.
physicsguy:
I don’t think anyone here is forgetting that. On the contrary, it’s assumed. I wrote it in some of my earliest COVID posts, as well.
Not fond of the term ‘natural immunity’….until recently, ‘acquired immunity’ was, I think, the term generally used for the immunity you get from actually having the disease. “Natural immunity’ sounds like something a hippie would buy at a health food store.
Maybe we should use “naturally acquired immunity,” then. The CDC/NIH gang denied it would provide protection, when in fact it does, and there was no good reason to think it wouldn’t.
David Foster.
Perhaps “natural immunity” refers to a genetic resistance to a certain disease more common in some populations than in others due to evolution of survival traits. When you don’t have the disease, you don’t have the natural immunity. So see Mann, “1491” about the epidemics in the Americas after the arrival of the Europeans with diseases not existing to that point in the Americas.
“Immunity acquired from a Covid infection provides strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness, according to research published Thursday in The Lancet — protection, experts say, that’s on par with what’s provided through two doses of an mRNA vaccine.”
Does anybody here actually think that “two doses of the mRNA vaccine” provides “strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness”? The Lancet lost all credibility in 2020, when it released a demonstrably false and highly misleading study. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/22/the-lancet-reforms-editorial-policy-after-hydroxychloroquine-covid-study-retraction
I agree with David Foster. If you got COVID and recovered, you have acquired an immunity to future infection (just like measles, mumps and chicken pox when we were kids). I do believe that many people have natural immunity, for some reason, meaning that they will not be infected even if exposed. I am one of those people. I never get the annual flu (and never had a flu shot) so I didn’t expect to get COVID, and I did not, despite plenty of exposure. Am I lucky to be one of those people? Yes, but there are probably a lot more out there.
One of my sisters has never had the flu. She and I had to share a bedroom when I got the mumps when we were kids. She never got the mumps. She gets a cold every now and then but it’s always mild. She has never been vaxxed and never got covid. She is seemingly immune to just about everything. On the other hand, she has high blood pressure and osteoporosis. You can’t go through life totally unscathed.
But they wanted their blood price, an excuse to kill many people in nursing homes and on ventilators deny an effective treatment and terrify the rest
They knew how it spread and how it didnt
Amazing that saying natural immunity is superior to the jab, not to long ago would have gotten you banned on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc and labeled a right wing science denier fascist racist conspiracy theorist. And possible investigated by the Fbi. And if a Dr, possibly been decertified for medical malpractice, and / or fired.
On why this was pushed – power and money.
So I stumbled across a post on reddit which had people mocking RWers saying “as if it’s better to be sick for 2 weeks than to get a 30 second shot”. I had to comment that it was the fact that when they were saying it the vaccine protection was better then having it, that no one could possibly know that either way.
Sometimes being lied to bothers people, and to be lied at so poorly is annoying. Truth is a good thing overall.
Then there was this admission—a “faux pas”—by some Pfizer scientists secretly recorded by Project Veritas.
In October 2021:
” Pfizer scientists: Natural immunity better than our vaccine;
” ‘Alternate treatments pushed aside over money.’ Scientists involved in development of Pfizer vaccine say natural immunity likely superior.”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/314561
One wonders how long they were able to hold onto their jobs…
– – – – – – –
I would agree with the different definitions of Natural Immunity meaning being naturally resistant to the virus vs. Acquired Immunity meaning being protected by antibodies after having acquired the virus.
“ Does anybody here actually think that “two doses of the mRNA vaccine” provides “strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness”? The Lancet lost all credibility in 2020, when it released a demonstrably false and highly misleading study.”
Except that natural immunity appears to be much diminished if you get fully vaccinated with one of the mRNA vaccines first. That is probably a result of a phenomenon know colloquially as “Original Antigenic Sin”. The same thing appears to be happening with the bivalent vaccines, which added Omicron variant spike producing mRNA to the original Wuhan variant spike producing mRNA. Vaccinated immune systems continue to fixate on fighting the Wuhan variant spikes, instead of the rest of the virus, or the Omicron spikes.
Bruce Hayden:
You keep asserting “facts” that are not facts.
Please stop doing it or at least provide links. I’m tired of playing whack-a-mole on this.
By the way, if anyone is interested in actual research on this, take a look.
Neo. Sorry.
But I don’t think that article was all that persuasive. It’s a year old article, published when Omicron was maybe a month old in this country (Omicron pushed out Dekta in December, 2021, in this country, and this article was published in February, 2022), and 7 months before a vaccine containing mRNA to generate Omicron spikes was released to the public (September, 2022, I believe, in the bivalent vaccines). This was also well before we saw so many Omicron breakthrough cases. He doesn’t so much provide links to current data disproving Original Antigenic Sin as a theory here, as just ridicule it. Which means that it comes across as pop science, which many believe that Science is known for.
His CV is not exceptional. Has a PhD in biochem, but not pharmacology, immunology, virology, etc. His previous pharmaceutical research does not appear to have been in areas that deal with viruses, but rather more in structural issues like osteoporosis. I prefer the articles from people like Malone, who have better credentials, and at the end of an article like that, will have links to a dozen or two papers. I assume that the author’s failure to footnote the article and bolster his assertions better is a result of the publication he is writing in, rather than any lack of rigor on his part.
Again, I apologize for you having to play whack a mole with my posts. I expect that we both spend comparable time on research here – we just read different stuff, that comes to contrary conclusions. As others here can attest, I post links to several articles a day in another forum on the virus and responses to it, and have been doing so for better than a year now. They tend to contradict the prevailing narrative about the efficacy, and esp the safety, of the mRNA vaccines. I probably find your acceptance of that narrative as frustrating as you do my questioning it. I really do believe that the mRNA vaccines are dangerous, and I am not the only one. The FL Surgeon General is advising against them, and the ID legislature is working on criminalizing administering them.
Here is a contrary article by Dr Malone last June: Immune Imprinting, Comirnaty and Omicron (part 1) and Immune Imprinting, Comirnaty and Omicron (part 2). Here is his background on his Substack: Who Is Dr Malone.
There is no all-encompassing natural immunity to a virus that mutates. That’s why you can get the flu every year. It’s also why a vaccine for all covid strains is IMPOSSIBLE.
A vaxx cannot do more than the body can do itself. Because the mutations evolve so readily, there is not going to be immunity to the new versions. And there is no vaccine that can provide such resistance.
If you had omicron, you don’t have natural immunity to a different mutation. And the jab is so hopelessly behind the mutations that it is medical and scientific malpractice to claim it provides any help at all. In fact, the virus is more likely to mutate in such ways as to specifically take advantage of the changes caused by the jab. That’s the nature of the vaxx and that’s why the jab is now infecting the jabbed at higher rates than the unjabbed.
Hint — the grossly dishonest CDC/FDA/NIH gestapo have completely flushed their credibility with their track record of relentless lies. Similarly, those who deny the most basic realities about immunity and evolving flu viruses should probably not be viewed as very credible.
An intelligent person wouldn’t throw down the term “gestapo” for shock effect, but it was stan.
Bruce Hayden:
I didn’t expect you to find it persuasive. I expect others to find it persuasive.
I am assuming your mind is made up on the subject and you are looking for validation, not invalidation. I find that’s the case with a lot of people and a lot of things.
And if I sound a bit testy it’s probably because I’ve tired of arguing the same points over and over with different people, whose minds are also made up. So there’s an aggregate effect.
I also find it odd that you say I accept a certain “narrative.” I do my own research and come to my own conclusions, and from the start I’ve not “accepted the narrative” on vaccines. For example, I’ve always rejected mandates, loud and clear. I also do not say that the shots prevent infection with COVID. I have said – and continue to say, because I believe the evidence so far is convincing – that they tend to help prevent serious illness and death from COVID, especially in elderly and other vulnerable populations. Plus, I have seen zero – and I mean ZERO – evidence that they cause harm beyond what is typically caused by other shots, except for a slight increase in temporary myocarditis (usually mild) in a very small number of young men. That’s one reason I question the need for vaccination in people under 40 who have no co-morbidities. However, because COVID itself causes more myocarditis than the shot does, even in that population, I think the jury is out on that one.
…the grossly dishonest CDC/FDA/NIH gestapo have completely flushed their credibility with their track record of relentless lies.
Dishonesty and incompetence alone did not make this situation as egregious as it was. It took coercion and censorship to make it the machinations of an authoritarian regime in an authoritarian society.
First they came for the unjabbed. But I was jabbed, so I did not speak out…
Come, come, stan you have forgotten some agencies for your Nazi exaggeration. Given the Covid/mRNA Vax and cancer controversy why are you failing to name the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS)? Who can be for cancer? Why would cancer have a society or an institute? Don’t they know that cancer is a scourge that is linked to mRNA Covid vaccines! (sarc/scorn)
om,
An intelligent person wouldn’t even engage with a nasty, vile, dumbass like you. So obviously, I’m not an intelligent person.
Do you enjoy being an asshole? Do you enjoy being an idiot?
You keep personalizing your disagreement with me in ugly terms. You have a problem. You are sick. I hope you get help. Good luck.
As for the term “gestapo”, I stand by that 100%. And I’ll bet you that a large number of people who frequent here agree with me that it is appropriate. How big a wager would you like to make?
History explains things even to the ignorant such as stan. But he stands by his state, proud, and arrogant.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-twitter-files-reveal-an-existential-threat/
Perhaps “gestapo” is inappropriately MILD to describe what the deep state health authorities did.
“the Twitter Files reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and indeed our country.”
Powerline’s Scott Johnson agrees. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/02/a-twitter-files-footnote-11.php
A majority of Americans see the FBI as Biden’s Gestapo. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/08/20/new-poll-most-americans-believe-the-fbi-is-now-bidens-gestapo-n1622668
It’s hardly a stretch to use the term for other parts of the deep state involved in strong arming dissent and mandating gross abuse of civil rights.
so we had an outbreak from a chinese research facility, funded by our tax dollars where they knew the parameters of spread and source, but lied locked down and killed millions around the world, through negligence and/or enemy action, take your pick, some therapies were banned, some were mandated, the effectiveness of each was considered irrelevant to same
A lot of people are ignorant it seems about history and how evil the Gestapo were. Nothing like exaggeration and hyperbole to manipulate people. Shocked.
Ministry of Love, is that good enough for you, or silly walks, the point is on so many instances it is awol and other times it is cruel and capricious
“ Does anybody here actually think that “two doses of the mRNA vaccine’ provides ‘strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness?”
I honestly don’t know. I can tell you that neither of us has ever experienced COVID symptoms, nor ever been tested. We both had the vaccine and the first booster. Possibly we had asymptomatic cases, possibly we managed never to be exposed, possibly we had some natural resistance to vaguely similar diseases. Neither of us tends to come down with infectious diseases; we go years without colds and may never have had the flu. Even granting that COVID was unusually dangerous for certain demographic groups, there’s apparently almost no such thing as a disease that overwhelms 100% of immune systems no matter how naive they are. COVID wasn’t in the same class, for instance, as rabies.
Oh–and we didn’t mask, to speak of, and only moderately limited our social contact, though admittedly we tend to be fairly solitary as a general rule.
So now it is “other parts” of the deep state that are the actual gestapo (lite?). The FBI are undoubtably enforcers of the Brandon junta, but they don’t have the snazzy black leather togs. (sarc) Antifa likes the black, but not the leather, at least not on the streets.
But stan cast his net rather wide and indiscriminately as is his wont. Paints with buckets not brushes.