At the end of August, a study was published showing that natural immunity provides much better protection against infection than the Pfizer vaccine. It was described by UCL’s Francois Balloux as “a bit of a bombshell”.
Subsequent studies have compared natural and vaccine-induced immunity at the cellular level. One found that infection-induced antibodies “exhibited superior stability and cross-variant neutralisation breadth” than vaccine-induced antibodies, suggesting that people who’d already been infected had better immunity against the then-novel Delta variant.
However, as I noted in my write-up of the “bombshell” study, its findings still needed to be replicated. After all, certain datasets or methods of analysis can sometimes yield quirky results, which don’t survive independent empirical tests.
Encouragingly, the findings now have been replicated – by another team of Israeli researchers, using a different dataset.
In the latest study, Yair Goldberg and colleagues tracked all the individuals in their dataset (of people in Israel) who had tested positive or received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine before 1st July, 2021. They then compared the number of infections in previously infected versus vaccinated individuals from August to September of 2021.
The researchers also examined the number of infections among those with so-called ‘hybrid immunity’ – i.e., previously infected individuals who got vaccinated.
For each of the three groups, they counted the number of infections and the number of days ‘at risk’ (i.e., the total number of people multiplied by the number of days on which they were ‘at risk’ of becoming infected). Adjustments were made for age, sex, ethnicity, calendar week and a measure of risk exposure.
Results are shown in the chart below. Each bar corresponds to the infection rate per 100,000 ‘risk days’. The reason the researchers used ‘risk days’, rather than just ‘people’, is that the composition of each group changed over time. For example, some previously infected people chose to get vaccinated.
Notice that the labels for the horizontal bars are not the same for each group. Since we want to compare apples with apples, look at the bars labelled “Recovered 6–8 months” and “Vaccinated 6–8 months”.
This comparison shows that, 6–8 months after the corresponding event, infection rates were more than six times higher among vaccinated individuals – 89 per 100,000 versus only 14 per 100,000 among previously infected individuals.
The chart also shows that infection rates were lower still among those with hybrid immunity, which is consistent with what the earlier study found. However, the difference between the hybrid group and the recovered group was relatively small. For example, infection rates at 6–8 months were only 20% higher in the recovered group.
Goldberg and colleagues’ study confirms that natural immunity does wane, though much more slowly than vaccine-induced immunity. Anyone claiming the contrary now has to contend with not one, but two, high quality studies.
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You should try economics. They are the master of the upward sloping graph and disingenuous Y-axis settings.
Add a dose of pal review and groupthink and you have the perfect movement to push a purely political line.
This website will go down in history as being more interesting, more prescient, and more accurate than much of the bull published by “The Scientists”.
Yep – despite Toby.
Lithuania’s brutal clampdown on the jab refuseniks By Emilia Mituziene
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/lithuanias-brutal-clampdown-on-the-jab-refuseniks/
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A foretaste of what is to come in the UK unless we stop it!
Fascinating and remarkable stuff, thanks.
Wow Mark you’ve blown my mind again
Is there any way you can turn your expertise to the “studies” that underpin the lies about covid? The ones that claim to prove asymptomatic transmission for example.
Hi SweetBabyCheeses,
I’ve written several articles last year examining COVID papers under the name “Sue Denim”. You can find them in the sidebar under the modelling section. I don’t think I looked at asymptomatic transmission though.
I’ve moved on to scientific fraud in general because other contributors are doing a good job of addressing COVID, and the new wider remit of the site allowed us to look at non lockdown topics. However I can revisit specific COVID papers of there is interest and people pick some they’d like examined.
Ohhh you’re Sue Denim! Nice work. Well all I know about the Asymptomatic Papers is from this website…I think there’s been just 3-4 papers in total that have then been cited and recited and it has somehow become accepted fact that it is a source of transmission. I think a couple of the papers were from China – in particular from obscure Doctors who had published nothing before or since. Then there was a paper from Italy maybe and one from somewhere totally random like Bahrain? The most shocking thing was that the total number of asymptomatic transmissions found amongst all these studies like in the region of 6-7 instances!
“Often these papers originate in China, where the CCP has mandated that every single medical doctor must publish research papers to get promoted (i.e. in their non-existent spare time).”
Oh, those awful commies.
I don’t want to shatter your illusions, but this is the story of western academia, and has been for years. Academics effectively have quotas for advancement. Quality is irrelevant, all that matters is quantity.
Western students have been using paper milles for decades too. It is all part of the ‘I bought a degree’ syndrome of mass entrance to university. One of the early systems that academics, and students, were forced to use was TurnItIn, used to ‘detect’ plagiarism in essays.
Yes,there is some truth in that statement as Western countries are producing lots of low quality papers in order to get promotions.But China is worse.Every single paper has to get green light form a cell in the CCP.Last year I went through several Chinese studies of masks which were used by WHO and others for the mask fanatics.All thoose articles were apalling both in design and genralisations and almost parodic in the fantastic outcomes.Not a single one would have been accepted in a more prestigious journal but they were all swallowed by the maskfanatics. The grotesque article about 11 million tested in Wuhan last summer had a statement that all had given consent. Every single article from China especially about C 19 should be taken with a pinch of salt.
There’s a big difference between an essay and a published research paper. An essay will never get read by anyone else. At undergraduate level it’s highly unlikely that a student is gifted enough to have a novel thought on a subject so I imagine professors just grade the same stuff over and over anyway. They’re more looking that you can form a coherent argument using critical reasoning. If people want to cheat at this then really they’ve just cheated themselves out of learning one of the few useful things Uni could teach them!
A research paper takes years, if not decades. Faking one involves a conspiracy with your colleagues. And involves faking both real life experiments and/or results. It’s super scary because laypeople take them as the holy grail. 99% of people do not have the statistical skill to even understand anything except the intro and conclusion let alone interrogate the results. But then Policy makers persuade politicians that they need to make decisions based off these papers, and we end up in pickles like the one we’re in now!
Catching up DS – See The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine’ -by Jon Jureidini and Leemon McHenry – a brilliant analysis of the pharma corruption of science and related journals, journalism, academia, the ex editor of the BMJ recently came out exposing this – Feyeraband’s ‘Against Method’ is playing out and t. Khun also in this vein – mixed with pure capitalism and it becomes clear how far we are from Popper and falsification principles- hardly surprising we have mass hypnosis and transhumanist loonies – The Science is a fiction.
Really excellent piece, Mike.
Thank you Sandra.