Ah yes, the venerable journalists at “biznews” hard at work.
Honestly, why do you think anyone here would take the advice of some random Wordpress site?
Also, natural immunity is variable whereas a vaccine gives standard coverage without having to measure everyone to see if they meet some sort of baseline natural immunity level. Additionally, vaccines don’t run the risk of killing you compared to an active Covid infection which very much can! The proposition of natural immunity over fast, effective, safe vaccines is preposterous on its face.
I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for posting the truth, but your article does not refute anything I stated or what the article I posted states. They could both be true. It's better to be vaccinated and have natural immunity than one or the other.
"...The CDC’s failure to report meaningful data has left policy makers flying blind. In the absence of good data to answer the basic questions Americans have been asking, political opinions have filled the vacuum. Strong data might have prevented much of the polarization over Covid.
Sound data from the CDC has been especially lacking on natural immunity from prior Covid infection. On Aug. 25, Israel published the most powerful and scientifically rigorous study on the subject to date. In a sample of more than 700,000 people, natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections..."
"...Despite this evidence, U.S. public health officials continue to dismiss natural immunity, insisting that those who have recovered from Covid must still get the vaccine. Policy makers and public health leaders, and the media voices that parrot them, are inexplicably sticking to their original hypothesis that natural immunity is fleeting, even as at least 15 studies show it lasts..."
"...The CDC did put out a study on natural immunity last month, forcefully concluding that vaccinated immunity was 2.3 times better than natural immunity. The CDC used these results to justify telling those with natural immunity to get vaccinated.
But the rate of infection in each group was less than 0.01%, meaning infections were exceedingly rare in the short two-month time period the agency chose to study. This is odd, given there are more than a year of data available. Moreover, despite having data on all 50 states, the CDC only reported data from Kentucky. Was Kentucky the only state that produced the desired result? Why else exclude the same data from the other 49 states?
Some public health officials are afraid to acknowledge natural immunity because they fear some will choose infection over vaccination. But leaders can encourage all Americans who aren’t immune to get vaccinated and be transparent with the data at the same time..."
"Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections"
"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant."
I’m willing to read these articles, and even sort of willing to consider other viewpoints, but this is mostly garbage.
What stands out is the authors’ favor of natural immunity being better than vaccination.
It may well be, but it has this small caveat that you need to have had the virus to become naturally immune. E.g. you need to take that 1-2% of not surviving entirely, and if too many people take that chance at the same time, even higher.
> You are correct, but that doesn't mean it's anecdotal. At this point we don't know whether natural immunity is 'better' than vaccine induced immunity, and it could go either way.
There is this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8 saying that natural immunity seems to be slightly worse than Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, but better than AstraZeneca or Johnson vaccine.
Have you considered the counternarrative that "vaccines are engineered to produce a strongest possible response" and you should therefore expect them to perform as designed, unlike haphazard nature.
Or perhaps consider that either might be true, and discard any prior assumptions about "natural = better".
> Has it been this controversial for any other disease
It's "controversial" because politics this time. It's not the default assumption in this or previous diseases, because it's often not true.
Not to claim now that those links are the whole story, but they do represent a whole lot of prior knowledge.
So it seems that there is some debate and nuance on this topic. My (simplistic) understanding is that vaccines produce a different and in some ways stronger response than the disease that they mimic, as they are literally designed to do. The COVID vaccines mostly contain Spike protein and therefor produce a very strong response ... but only to spike protein. recovery from infection produces response to that and other parts of the virus.
The article reads like we knew all along that natural immunity worked better than vaccines. We didn’t, we have data now that provides strong evidence to the protection by having natural immunity. I know it’s really trying to hard to tap into that anger that pushes clicks.
"The COVID–19 vaccines...offer a...more reliable means of protection than natural immunity."
This is false. She even goes on to say "Pfizer vaccine blocked 90% of infections after both doses" but we're seeing 99.9%+ protection from natural immunity.
She also doesn't put her logic on git (not surprising). If she had built a simple spreadsheet with the important data she'd realize her mistakes (assuming good faith).
> "got natural immunity which is superior" is factually incorrect, at least to every statistical study done by national health orgs.
Natural immunity of an unvaccinated person is superior to a vaccinated person without natural immunity, all else equal, and the difference isn't even close. It concerns me that people still don't accept this.
See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... for conclusive proof of this. I don't have my notes on that study in front of me right now but off the top of my head natural immunity was at least 7x superior when compared to people who were double-vaccinated but with no exposure to the actual virus.
The claim was "Natural immunity comes with a 10--25x greater risk of death". That's a statement about the chance of dying from the vaccine to the chance of dying from Covid.
The numbers you're actually using are something quite different: they're comparing the chance of dying from Covid if vaccinated, vs. the chance of dying from Covid if unvaccinated.
The only credible reports of Covid vaccine fatalities that I'm aware of were from the AZ and J&J ones, and seemed to be on the order of 100 cases in all European countries before the use of those vaccines was stopped at least for the at-risk group (young women).
If the chance of dying from the vaccine was only 10x lower than that of dying from Covid, we'd have millions of dead from the vaccine. We don't.
I feel like you only need to read the comments below the article to remember why the media has no idea how to report on this. Apparently it is hard to teach people that vaccination could save their life, and that it gives vastly better outcomes than waiting to get COVID “naturally”. And yet we have vast amounts of data to show that.
Besides, why does it feel that many people have an end goal of ‘best antibodies without the benefit of a vaccine’ rather than, say, ‘actually enjoying a disease-free life’?
They are saying that vaccine-induced immunity is not likely to be more effective than natural immunity (of which we are already uncertain about the effectiveness)
don't your links directly contradict the article that was posted?
The article states infection from COVID seems to produce better immunity than the vaccines.
Please, if there is any misinformation in the article, tell us where it is.
IMO a number of high profile politicians and corporate media are also guilty of misinformation.
Eg 'pandemic of the unvaccinated'. This seems to equate no immunity with naturally acquired immunity, and must surely be misinformation, but much of the media is blind to it.
If you can't figure out whether natural immunity or vaccines are more effective based on the information we have available, the problem is with you, not the science.
>>Natural Immunity and Covid-19: Twenty-Nine Scientific Studies to Share with Employers, Health Officials, and Politicians
Right, more bogus anti-vax arguments.
Yes, getting infected does provide immunity.
NO, getting infected is not better than vaccinated immunity, which is less variable, and more reliable.
NO getting infected alone is especially not better than infection+vaccination, which apparently provides the most robust immunity.
I don't have the bandwidth or time to accumulate a full list, but [1] is a good start, and then follow up with the studies in the references.
I still find it astonishing the amount of effort being put in to evade a safe, effective, convenient, and free preventative step, and even seeking this kind of noise on here. Oh well, let the downvoting frenzy begin.
"Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization."
"Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant."
Classic NIH:
Say there isn't enough data when challenged on a policy, then deliberately not study it. They did this for DECADES with cannabis.
Honestly, why do you think anyone here would take the advice of some random Wordpress site?
Also, natural immunity is variable whereas a vaccine gives standard coverage without having to measure everyone to see if they meet some sort of baseline natural immunity level. Additionally, vaccines don’t run the risk of killing you compared to an active Covid infection which very much can! The proposition of natural immunity over fast, effective, safe vaccines is preposterous on its face.
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