How was the decision by @alexandrosM

How was the decision made to ignore immunity from prior infection?

In this clip, Paul Offit describes how he and another person advised in favor of accepting natural immunity, while two others voted against it.

A? on why that was possibly the worst decision of the pandemic:


To understand the fallout of this decision, we can start from this piece by @FamedCelebrity which gives us a decent estimate of where seroprevalence was during the bulk of the vaccination campaign:

https://wmbriggs.com/post/38585/


Basic eyeballing can tell us that something like 1/3 to 1/2 of all vaccinations were administered to the already immune. It could be somewhat higher or lower, but what matters is to understand that there is a very large population of already immune that were vaccinated.


Accepting that the vaccines provided protection to the elderly & those with comorbidities (see @drrollergator’s analysis below), then slowing down the roll-out to vaccinate those already immune cost many lives. One cannot believe the one but not the other.

https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/damned-lies-and-vaccine-statistics


In addition, the data is accumulating that those with prior infection have more side-effects on their first dose. Here’s a British study to this effect:

https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/vaccine-after-effects-more-common-in-those-who-already-had-covid


One more study, this time from the U.S. has found, “Vaccine recipients with pre-existing immunity experience systemic side effects with a significantly higher frequency”.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.29.21250653v1.full.pdf


Another study concurring in the same direction: “Prior COVID-19 infection but not ongoing Long-COVID symptoms were associated with an increase in the risk of self-reported adverse events following BNT162b2/Pfizer vaccination”

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.15.21252192v1


I want to cite this claim well, because it’s not yet well understood. But even from a mechanism perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Here’s one hypothesis of how the immune system being primed to attack the spike protein could be linked to myocarditis:


And of course, widespread reports of adverse events, as well as outright ignoring of natural immunity have contributed to people being hesitant to receive the vaccine. This isn’t a matter of simple social media noise. The signals are loud and clear.

https://joomi.substack.com/p/i-was-deceived-about-covid-vaccine


How many of these adverse events were suffered by people already immune to the virus for dubious benefit? Here’s another part of this puzzle: the RCTs did not test on people who were already immune. They were vaccinated with very little data to go on.

https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/11/25/when-there-is-good-vaccine-news-efficacy-is-only-the-beginning-o.html


And as we keep being told, VAERS can’t be trusted. What it says about rolling out the fastest mass-vaccination campaign in history on a novel platform, without reliable pharmacovigilance is another story, but in the case of those already recovered, we’re flying completely blind.


While the US has been steamrolling those already immune, the data has been steadily accumulating. A massive study from Israel showing 13-26 times better protection. And then another more recent one with millions of participants:


And these are just the tip of the iceberg. We’re up to 150+ studies on natural immunity at this point. The data simply isn’t up for debate. But of course immunology should tell us this already – anything else would be a surprise.


While all this was happening, the CDC was busy cherrypicking results to counteract every other study, by data mining and using flawed statistics. That’s where the “vaccines 5x better than natural immunity” meme came from.


Here’s what @MartyMakary had to say about the study:


Would the CDC play politics with its studies? Well, thankfully, we don’t have to wonder.

Every study published in CDC MMWR is not peer reviewed, but it “undergoes a rigorous multilevel clearance process” to make sure it “comports with CDC policy”.


Yeap. The CDC released studies that were almost certainly downstream of the decision made after Offit’s panel advised on policy, with the conclusion already set. Which is why the whole literature said one thing, while CDC said another. Absent studies, they made some up.


Based on these sham studies, they fired medical staff that had heroically served on the front lines, had contracted the virus, and knew that taking a novel vaccine made no sense for them. These are the people that stood up for reason over authority. And we let them go like this.


They fired this staff, while at the same time pushing mandates to force the holdouts, most of them immune, to take a vaccine. And we justified this because of the lack of ICU beds. Because we didn’t have the staff for them. Which were fired for not taking the vaccine.


In summary, ignoring natural immunity not only cost lives to the virus, it cost lives to adverse events, it tore apart the social fabric, punished some of the heroes on the front lines, and humiliated the whole endeavor of science and public health, possibly for decades to come.


And these are just some of the most obvious side-effects. To the degree that all this prolonged the pandemic, many of the global costs of lockdowns that @DrJBhattacharya @Martinkulldorff @SunetraGupta have been highlighting were extended and expanded further.


And then, a week ago, the CDC comes out with a proper study, telling us what we knew all along: yeah, natural immunity is more effective than vaccine immunity if you have it already. Me, a rando on Twitter knew this many months ago. Have they no shame?


I’ll let the reader fill in the gaps in terms of estimating the lives, money, and social capital that this inhuman policy by the US government cost. No matter how you slice it, it’s astronomical. All involved did *not* follow the science, and should have a lot to answer for.


The only remaining question in my mind is “why?”. Did they not trust people? Did they worry about the unvaccinated cohort looking better in the statistics as the vaccines waned? Were they afraid that focused protection as recommended by @gbdeclaration would be seen as sensible?


Honestly, I’m at a loss. I can think of no good reason for such callous disregard for the scientific process.

If you have ideas, please respond with them and I’ll attach them to the thread alongside any corrections, as usual.

Thanks for reading along, and good luck to us all.


And what better way to top this off, but this report *today* by @MartyMakary that the JAMA paper he and others wrote on natural immunity has been taken down from LinkedIn for “violating community guidelines”. The censorship is ongoing.


Welp. It seems Trump got “fact checked” for stating the obvious. Whatever your opinion about him, this is ridiculous.


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