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The CDC Finally Admits That Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Is Superior to the Immunity Induced by COVID-19 Vaccines

by Feb 10, 2022Health Freedom, Special Reports8 comments

(Photo by Raed Mansour, licensed under CC BY 2.0)
After long lying that natural immunity is weak and inferior, the CDC has finally admitted it offers better protection than COVID-19 vaccines.

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Introduction

In October 2020, two months before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first granted emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who went on to become director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under the Biden administration, claimed that vaccines would be needed to achieve herd immunity because “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”.

That was a lie.

At the time Walensky made that bold statement, studies had already shown that, in addition to effective cellular immune responses, neutralizing antibodies induced by infection were persistent in the blood of almost all people who recovered. Additionally, it was known that infection induced memory responses, with indications of the induction of long-lived bone marrow plasma cells—a known immunologic marker of long-term immunity—that could rapidly churn out more antibodies in the event of reexposure to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The claim that the vaccines would confer herd immunity by stopping infection and transmission and thereby bring the pandemic to an end proved to be a false promise. The induced sterilizing immunity, or ability of circulating antibodies to stop infection, wanes rapidly so that fully vaccinated people can become infected and spread the virus to others.

Walensky herself publicly admitted this in August 2021 after CDC researchers had learned that 74% of COVID-19 cases in a large outbreak in Massachusetts were fully vaccinated people and that the amount of virus shed by vaccinated people was just as high as that of the unvaccinated, suggesting equal contagiousness. (It was this finding that prompted the CDC to reverse its mask guidance, shifting from telling fully vaccinated people that they no longer needed to wear a mask to telling them that they needed to mask up once again.)

After the FDA issued emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020, the CDC claimed that the available evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived.

That, again, was a demonstrable lie.

That falsehood was eventually removed from the CDC’s website only to be replaced with a recommendation for people who’ve recovered from infection to still get vaccinated on the grounds that the duration of natural immunity remained unknown.

Thus, while no longer outright lying, the CDC continued to deceive the public by deliberately withholding the fact that studies had shown that infection was likely to induce long-term immunity.

“…there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection…”

Indeed, in May 2021, scientists confirmed that infection induced differentiation of memory B cells into long-lived bone marrow plasma cells, an immunological marker of long-term immunity. Yet the CDC persisted in its deceitful message that even people who already recovered from infection needed to get fully vaccinated on the implicit grounds that natural immunity might be short-lived.

Then, in August 2021, the CDC went even further by explicitly claiming that the evidence suggested that “people get better protection by being fully vaccinated compared with having had COVID-19.”

That was yet another outright lie, even more egregious than the CDC’s earlier disinformation.

In fact, by that time, studies had overwhelmingly shown natural immunity to be both broader and more durable than the immunity induced by vaccines.

The CDC continued lying that natural immunity was inferior until December 3, 2021, when that disinformation, like its original disinformation about natural immunity being short-lived, was removed from its website.

Nevertheless, the CDC to this day persists in telling the public that natural immunity may or may not offer only “some” protection, in comparison to COVID-19 vaccines that “are effective at preventing COVID-19”.

Additionally, on January 15, 2021, the CDC started telling people with natural immunity that they, too, should get fully vaccinated on the grounds that this would provide them with an additional protective benefit beyond the protection afforded by natural immunity alone. To this day, the CDC persists in telling people who already have natural immunity that getting vaccinated “provides added protection to your immune system.”

However, a study by CDC researchers published on January 19, 2022, in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) not only shows incontrovertibly that natural immunity offered better protection than vaccine-induced immunity against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, but also challenges the assumption—never studied in clinical trials—that vaccination after recovery from infection offers such a substantial additional benefit that it clearly outweighs the risks from these pharmaceutical products.

In fact, the claim that the data show that the vaccines confer a substantial additional benefit in protection against COVID-19 is conspicuously absent from the new CDC study.

What the CDC’s Own Data Tell Us About Natural vs. Vaccine-Induced Immunity

A picture speaks a thousand words, so let’s start by looking at two key graphs contained in the supplementary materials (not in the main paper) showing clearly how unvaccinated people with natural immunity fared better than people who were fully vaccinated (the first graph showing data from California and the second from New York).

To understand what you’re about to see: the lines on these graphs show the risk of being identified as a “laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 case” (i.e., receiving a positive PCR test) expressed as an estimated hazard rate (the rate of lab-confirmed cases per 100,000 person-days at risk). Don’t worry about not understanding this methodology; all you need to know is that higher up along the y-axis means greater risk, and the x-axis represents time from May 30 into November 2021.

There are four lines: (1) the solid dark blue line shows the risk for unvaccinated people without evidence of prior infection, or people who were immunologically naïve; (2) the dotted blue line represents vaccinated people without evidence of prior infection, or people with vaccine-induced immunity; (3) the dotted light blue line represents unvaccinated people with evidence of prior infection, or people with natural immunity; (4) the dotted black line represents vaccinated people with evidence of prior infection, or people with so-called “hybrid immunity”.

Here’s what the respective data from California and New York show:

CDC study shows natural immunity is superior
CDC study shows natural immunity offers better protection than COVID-19 vaccines
In other words, the CDC’s own data falsify the claim that the CDC started making in August 2021 that the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines is superior to natural immunity.

As you can see, unsurprisingly, by far the highest risk of receiving a positive PCR test was associated with being immunologically naïve. By comparison, the risk was far lower for people who were fully vaccinated.

However, even greater protection was offered by the immunity induced by infection, with or without vaccination.

In other words, the CDC’s own data falsify the claim that the CDC started making in August 2021 that the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines is superior to natural immunity.

Note that this result holds true even though their methodology biased the study in favor of finding comparably greater protection amongst the vaccinated.

How the CDC Study Was Biased Against Natural Immunity

Antibodies in the blood that are capable of neutralizing the virus play a key role in immunity by preventing the virus from being able to enter the cells and replicate. Antibodies, of course, are not the body’s only defense. Even if this “sterilizing” immunity wanes over time, there remain cellular immune responses that help limit and clear an infection, thereby reducing the severity of symptoms or preventing clinical disease altogether.

It’s important to emphasize once again that the loss of a detectable level of antibodies in the blood does not mean loss of natural immunity because there are cellular immune responses as well as memory B cell responses, including induction of long-lived bone marrow plasma cells capable of rapidly ramping up production of neutralizing antibodies. Furthermore, studies have shown persistence of neutralizing antibodies in the blood among the vast majority of individuals who recover from infection, and studies have shown that antibodies are more durable with natural immunity than vaccine-induced immunity. These are among the many reasons why we knew back in August 2021, when the CDC started explicitly claiming that natural immunity is inferior, that it was a lie. This is not mere hindsight!

Now, if someone who has already acquired immunity through infection is reexposed to the virus or receives a vaccine, the antigen exposure will result in a “boost” of the antibody response, thereby restoring sterilizing immunity. The dramatic rapid increase in antibodies observed in people who get vaccinated after recovering from infection is not a function of the vaccination per se; it is rather a function of their pre-existing immunologic memory. That is, it is a function of their natural immunity acquired from the prior infection.

While reinfections can result in severe disease for some people, just as with “breakthrough” infections in some fully vaccinated people, a reinfection is much more likely to be mild or asymptomatic compared to the primary infection, and the reexposure itself would serve as a natural booster. The boosting of immune responses due to reexposure to the pathogen is known in the medical literature as “exogenous boosting”.

The vaccination does not prevent exposure (only the behavior and circumstances of the individual can do that), and obviously it would make no sense to argue that the vaccination is necessary if the exposure itself were to constitute a harmless natural booster.

So, to determine whether vaccination truly confers an additional benefit beyond natural immunity alone, it is critical to control for time since last antigen exposure.

For example, if a person with pre-existing natural immunity was originally infected in June 2020 and received a positive PCR test in June 2021 indicating a reinfection, that’s up to a full year in which the person’s natural immunity protected them from reinfection and a full year for potential waning of antibodies in the blood.

By contrast, if a person had no history of prior infection and completed the two-dose vaccine regimen in April 2021, then received a positive PCR test in August 2021, that’s a maximum of just four months in which the antibodies induced by vaccination offered protection against infection.

Yet, the CDC’s methodology virtually assured that there was a larger pool of people in their study with natural immunity whose levels of neutralizing antibodies had greater time for potential waning than the vaccinated people included in the study.

Obviously, to answer the question, it is not scientifically valid to compare incidence of infections among a bunch of people with natural immunity who were infected over a year ago with a bunch of people who became fully vaccinated just a few months ago.

Yet, the CDC’s methodology virtually assured that there was a larger pool of people in their study with natural immunity whose levels of neutralizing antibodies had greater time for potential waning than the vaccinated people included in the study.

Anyone with a history of infection prior to March 1, 2021, was included in the naturally immune group, whereas the cutoff for becoming fully vaccinated was May 16, 2021.

The CDC’s rationale for this is that they didn’t want to include naturally immune people with a positive PCR test within 90 days of their prior positive test due to the high risk of the second test not indicating a true reinfection. This is because PCR tests return positive results for non-infectious viral RNA fragments lingering in the body after clearance of the infection. Certainly, the 90-day period was a reasonable precaution against misclassification of “reinfection”, but then the CDC should also have included only people who were fully vaccinated by the same cutoff date, March 1.

Additionally, vaccines weren’t available until the end of December 2020, so obviously the CDC included nobody vaccinated prior to that time, whereas people infected prior to that time—potentially all the way back to the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020—were included. To truly compare the effectiveness of natural with vaccine-induced immunity, the CDC should have included only people with a more recent history of infection, excluding those who were infected prior to the availability of vaccines.

Arguably, a different study design altogether should have been undertaken in which vaccinated and naturally immune subjects were matched for time since last antigen exposure, along with matching for other potential confounders, to try to overcome the selection biases inherent in observational studies.

Anyhow, the CDC failed to control for this factor and instead biased the data towards finding superior protection afforded by vaccines. Despite this bias, the data still falsified the CDC’s claim that natural immunity is inferior.

The CDC Study’s Authors Admit That Natural Immunity Offered Better Protection Against Delta

In the main body of their paper, the CDC researchers acknowledge what we can see for ourselves in their supplementary graphs. During the period of observation, they note, rates of COVID-19 diagnosis among fully vaccinated people “were consistently higher than rates among unvaccinated persons with a history of COVID-19”.

Quantifying this, they note that fully vaccinated individuals generally had between two to three times the risk of infection compared to those with natural immunity (depending on whether the data was from New York or California, respectively).

As the CDC authors state in their conclusion, “after the emergence of the Delta variant and over the course of time,” the incidence of infection “increased sharply” among fully vaccinated individuals without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, “but only slightly among both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons with previously diagnosed COVID-19.”

Comparing rates of COVID-19 diagnosis between those with natural versus hybrid immunity, those with hybrid immunity tended to have slightly lower risk. During certain weeks, this difference reached statistical significance. (See Table 2; where the confidence intervals are overlapping, it means the result was not statistically significant.)

However, again, this could be an artifactual finding resulting from the failure to control for time since last antigen exposure rather than a true effect of vaccination among those with prior infection. Essentially by design, those who were also vaccinated would generally be more likely to have had a more recent antigen exposure (i.e., the vaccination).

More importantly, the CDC researchers also compared the risk of severe disease using hospitalization as their proxy measure and found no significant benefit of vaccination for those who already had immunity from a prior infection.

This data is presented in the main paper in the following graph:

CDC study shows no additional benefit of vaccinating those with natural immunity

Once again, you can see that those who had recovered from prior infection, with or without subsequent vaccination, were better protected than those who were fully vaccinated without prior infection.

Thus, again, when considering both protection against infection and protection against severe disease, the CDC’s own data falsify its earlier claim that natural immunity is inferior.

As the authors summarized their findings:

These results suggest that vaccination protects against COVID-19 and related hospitalization and that surviving a previous infection protects against a reinfection. Importantly, infection-derived protection was greater after the highly transmissible Delta variant became predominant, coinciding with early declining of vaccine-induced immunity in many persons.

More importantly, the CDC researchers also compared the risk of severe disease using hospitalization as their proxy measure and found no significant benefit of vaccination for those who already had immunity from a prior infection.

In other words, natural immunity offered greater protection against both hospitalization and infection with the Delta variant, with no evidence of waning of natural immunity as observed with vaccine-induced immunity.

The CDC authors also noted that international studies had “also demonstrated increased protection in persons with previous infection, with or without vaccination, relative to vaccination alone.”

The superiority of natural immunity is also acknowledged in the CDC’s press release for the study, which states that “those who were previously infected, both with or without prior vaccination, had the greatest protection.”

A New Cleveland Clinic Study Also Demonstrates the Superiority of Natural Immunity

While the CDC press release does not claim that its study showed a substantial benefit of vaccination for those with pre-existing immunity, the CDC does try to maintain that claim by linking to a different study that the CDC characterizes as having shown that, “with increasing time since prior infection, vaccination provides greater protection against COVID-19 compared to prior infection alone, emphasizing the importance of being up to date on COVID-19 vaccination.”

There are two important observations to be made about this recommendation.

The first is that the CDC is applying a completely different criterion for recommending boosting of immunity by vaccination depending entirely on whether the person has or has not already recovered from infection.

This inconsistency in the standard used as the basis for the recommendation is not arbitrary; rather, it is because the CDC, as ever, is basing its recommendation on its policy goal of achieving maximum vaccine uptake rather than on the science.

Remember, back in the fall of 2021, the debate among “public health” officials and policy advisers about whether to recommend a “booster” dose revolved entirely around whether the goal should be to prevent infection or to prevent severe disease.

Those who argued against a booster dose pointed out that, while the sterilizing immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines admittedly wanes after several months, the immune responses continued to moderate the severity of disease, with continued vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization and death.

When the decision was finally made to recommend a booster dose for all adults, it was precisely because the data were starting to show waning of protection against severe disease, as well.

This was explicitly acknowledged by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, in an interview with the New York Times on November 12, 2021. As Fauci explained:

We’re starting to see waning immunity against infection and waning immunity, in the beginning aspects, against hospitalization, and if you look at Israel, which has always been a month to a month-and-a-half ahead of us in the dynamics of the outbreak and their vaccine response, and in every other element of the outbreak, they are seeing a waning immunity not only against infection but against hospitalizations and to some extent death, which is starting to now involve all age groups. It isn’t just the elderly.

Fauci anticipated that therefore booster doses were “going to be an absolutely essential component of our response” to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CDC is applying a completely different criterion for recommending boosting of immunity by vaccination depending entirely on whether the person has or has not already recovered from infection.

So, for those whose immune systems were primed by vaccination, the CDC’s criterion for recommending a booster dose is waning of protection against severe disease, whereas its criterion for recommending a boost in antibody levels from vaccination for those whose immune systems were primed by infection is the potential for slight waning over time of protection against reinfection.

The second key observation about the recommendation in the CDC’s press release is that the cited study, by researchers from the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, excoriates the CDC’s recommendation that even those with a recent prior infection get vaccinated and the CDC’s claim that natural immunity is inferior to that induced by COVID-19 vaccines.

What the Cleveland Clinic’s Data Tell Us About Natural Immunity

An earlier study by this same team of researchers had notably found no additional benefit of vaccination among those with prior immunity from infection over nearly six months of follow up. Looking at health care workers, they set out to reexamine the question over a longer duration including periods of first Delta and then Omicron predominance.

Like the CDC, they defined “reinfection” as a positive PCR test 90 days or more after a first positive test.

In other words, for the duration of the year, they observed no significant benefit of vaccination for those with pre-existing natural immunity.

They found that, “Among those previously infected, until the emergence of the Omicron variant, the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was not significantly different between those vaccinated and unvaccinated, even at almost a year of follow-up.”

In other words, for the duration of the year, they observed no significant benefit of vaccination for those with pre-existing natural immunity.

Among symptomatic infections, only 2.9% were among those who had previously had COVID-19, and this same group comprised only 1.5% of hospitalizations for COVID-19.

To examine the duration of protection provided by natural immunity, the authors looked at the risk with time since prior infection and found no significant increased risk for either infection or symptomatic infection.

In other words, they found no evidence for significant loss of natural immunity over time.

Most infections among those with natural immunity “occurred near the tail end of the study when duration since prior infection was a year or longer for every previously infected person.” The authors remarked that their inability to find a significant association with days since prior infection is probably because natural immunity protects against reinfection “for at least several months”, and “protection by natural immunity in the absence of vaccination appeared to be at least a year in the pre-Omicron period.”

On the other hand, their findings did reflect the ability of the Omicron variant to partially escape the immune responses induced either by prior infection or vaccination (which is a function of the mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant rather than a function of waning immunity).

They present a graph in the paper showing the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 for each of the different groups, which is similar to the graphs shown in the CDC study: (1) the red line represents the immunologically naïve; (2) the desaturated red line is vaccine-induced immunity; (3) the blue line is natural immunity; (4) and the desaturated blue line is hybrid immunity. The shaded area around each line are the 95% confidence bands (with statistical significance where the confidence intervals do not overlap):

Cleveland Clinic study shows natural immunity is superior

As you can see, natural immunity was associated with a significantly lower risk of infection with the Delta variant than vaccine-induced immunity.

This significance is lost after Omicron became predominant, but this could be due to a similar failure to control for time since last antigen exposure, with the possibility of fully vaccinated subjects with or without prior infection having received a booster dose.

Curiously, the authors seem to have overlooked this possibility. Although the recommendation for a booster dose had been made during their period of observation, they don’t even mention boosters and did not differentiate health care workers who received a booster shot with those who only received the primary two-dose regimen.

Failure to control for time since last antigen exposure in light of the recommendation for booster shots could also explain the lower incidence of Omicron infection observed for those with so-called “hybrid” immunity. Indeed, “previously infected” was defined as having had an infection prior to the starting date of the study, which was the point in time when vaccines became available; “vaccinated” was therefore defined as becoming fully vaccinated after the starting date.

Thus, the Cleveland Clinic study is biased against natural immunity in the same way as the CDC’s study, by guaranteeing that those in the previously infected group had a longer duration for waning of sterilizing immunity to be compared with vaccinated individuals with much more recent antigen exposure.

Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the health care workers included in this study would have followed the recommendation to get a booster shot (for which they were eligible due to occupation since October 20, 2021, and due to being 18 years of age or older since November 19, 2021), in which case the decision to characterize study subjects only by whether they had received the primary regimen is a major flaw that biases this study, too, in favor of finding greater protection of vaccination compared to natural immunity.

Thus, the Cleveland Clinic study is biased against natural immunity in the same way as the CDC’s study, by guaranteeing that those in the previously infected group had a longer duration for waning of sterilizing immunity to be compared with vaccinated individuals with much more recent antigen exposure.

The authors acknowledge additional limitations that might have biased their findings in favor of greater vaccine effectiveness compared with natural immunity. Since the clinic did not have a policy of screening employees for asymptomatic infection, some health care workers “might have been misclassified as previously uninfected, thereby underestimating the protective effect of prior infection.”

Also, “Any difference in rates of testing across the comparison groups would likely be from comparatively less testing of vaccinated individuals, because of a sense of being protected by vaccination, thereby overestimating the protective effect of vaccination.”

In the supplementary materials, the study authors present additional graphs showing cumulative incidence by immunological status. (These graphs are confusingly labeled “Supplementary Figure S1” and “Supplementary Figure S3” by the publisher but evidently correspond, respectively, with what the authors describe as “Figure 4” and “Figure 5” in the paper.)

When limiting the data only to symptomatic infections rather than all positive tests, the graph looked like this:

Cleveland Clinic study shows natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is superior

As you can see, when excluding those who tested positive but had no symptoms of illness, the confidence bands for those with natural immunity and hybrid immunity begin to overlap more after the emergence of the Omicron variant.

Furthermore, they presented the following graph looking at cumulative incidence of COVID-19 requiring hospitalizations:

cleveland natural immunity 3 scaled

As with the CDC study, these data indicate that there is no significant benefit of vaccination of those with pre-existing natural immunity in terms of protection against severe disease. What mattered for keeping people out of the hospital wasn’t “vaccinated” versus “unvaccinated” but immunologically experienced versus immunologically naïve.

As the Cleveland Clinic researchers politely and understatedly put it:

Categorization as “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated” is a less accurate way of expressing risk of COVID-19 than classifying into “protected” (anyone who’s either had COVID-19 or has been vaccinated) and “vulnerable” (anyone who has neither had COVID-19 nor been vaccinated). As it’s become increasingly obvious that natural immunity from prior COVID-19 protects against reinfection, vaccine recommendations that do not factor in prior infection should be re-examined.

Of course, this is an implicit criticism of the policies of the US government, from the CDC’s vaccine recommendations to the efforts of the Biden administration to mandate vaccination even for people who are already naturally immune.

As with the CDC study, these data indicate that there is no significant benefit of vaccination of those with pre-existing natural immunity in terms of protection against severe disease.

In addition to criticizing government policies, the authors criticize the CDC’s prior research, noting that the “single study” concluding that prior vaccination was more protective than prior infection was “conducted by the CDC” and that this finding “has not been replicated elsewhere.”

On the contrary, numerous studies from around the world have found similar levels of protection, and a large study in Israel “found that unvaccinated individuals with prior COVID-19 actually had significantly lower risks of COVID-19, symptomatic COVID-19, and hospitalization, than vaccinated individuals without prior COVID-19, a finding also observed in our study.”

In fact, that Israeli study found that vaccinated individuals had a thirteen-fold greater risk of infection with the Delta variant than those with natural immunity, and contrary to false claims in the media, it also found no significant benefit of vaccination for individuals with pre-existing natural immunity.

Incidentally, the authors of the more recent CDC study acknowledging the superiority of natural immunity falsely claimed that “two previous U.S. studies found more protection from vaccination than from previous infection during periods before Delta predominance.” (Emphasis added.)

However, the claim that this was shown by the first of the two studies referenced is scientifically fraudulent because that study did not even compare protection between unvaccinated people with prior infection and vaccinated people without prior infection; the study only included subjects whose immune systems were primed by infection.

Of course, that didn’t stop the media from mindlessly parroting the CDC’s false claims about the study’s findings. The AP did a faux “fact check” citing that one study while ignoring literally all of the non-CDC-originating scientific evidence to support the false claim that natural immunity is “not long-lasting” and offers only “short-term” protection.

That misinformative “fact check” article was in turn cited by Twitter to support the claim that “vaccines are more effective than natural immunity”.

Twitter and other social media companies, of course, are utilizing their “fact check” partners to censor facts that don’t align with the adopted political agenda, so anyone who dared to tell the truth that natural immunity is superior risked having their posts removed or even being deplatformed on the false pretext of spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines. (I personally had a post deleted by Facebook for stating, with a link to mountains of evidence, that the CDC’s claim that vaccines induce superior immunity is a lie.)

Logically, one cannot draw conclusions about the effectiveness of natural versus vaccine-induced immunity based on a study that excluded everyone whose immunity protected them from being hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms and then testing positive for SARS-CoV-2.

The second study referenced, the sole study mentioned by the Cleveland Clinic researchers as supporting the CDC’s claim, looked at the vaccination status of hospitalized patients. However, as epidemiologist and infectious disease expert Dr. Martin Kulldorff has explained, that CDC study does not answer the question of whether recovery from infection or vaccination is more effective at reducing the risk of subsequently being hospitalized with COVID-19. Instead, the question it explores is “whether vaccination or Covid recovery is more related to Covid hospitalization or if it is more related to other respiratory type hospitalizations.”

Logically, one cannot draw conclusions about the effectiveness of natural versus vaccine-induced immunity based on a study that excluded everyone whose immunity protected them from being hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms and then testing positive for SARS-CoV-2.

The Cleveland Clinic researchers also took issue with the lone CDC study purporting to show that natural immunity is inferior, noting that it also “was biased in that protection from subsequent COVID-19 could be easily explained” by vaccinated people being less likely to engage in behaviors that placed them at risk of infection. They opined that this “was extremely likely in the population that was studied,” resulting in observed protectiveness that reflected behavioral differences “rather than vaccination.”

Conclusion

When COVID-19 vaccines were first authorized for emergency use by the FDA, the CDC falsely claimed that the evidence indicated that natural immunity was weak and short-lived.

That explicit falsehood was subsequently removed from the CDC’s website only to be replaced with a recommendation that willfully deceived the public by withholding the fact that studies had rather shown that natural immunity was robust and durable.

In August 2021, during the predominance of the Delta variant, the CDC went so far as to explicitly claim that the immunity induced by vaccines is superior to that induced by infection, even though the scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated the opposite to be true.

The CDC removed that lie from its website in December 2021, and now CDC researchers themselves have published a study falsifying the claim.

Nevertheless, the CDC continues to recommend that people with natural immunity get vaccinated, as it has done since the start of the mass vaccination campaign.

To support that recommendation, the CDC cites a study by Cleveland Clinic researchers showing that for the whole year since the CDC started claiming a significant additional benefit of vaccination for those with pre-existing natural immunity, no such benefit could be observed.

While the data from the Cleveland Clinic study do indicate an additional benefit after the emergence of the Omicron variant, this could be an artifact of the biases that result from the failure to control for time since last antigen exposure, especially in light of the failure to account for possible administration of booster doses among study subjects.

Furthermore, both the CDC and the Cleveland Clinic study failed to find a significant additional benefit of vaccination for those with pre-existing natural immunity in terms of protection against severe disease.

Consequently, the CDC has had to adopt different criteria for the recommendation to use vaccines to boost immunity depending on whether the individual’s immune system was initially primed by vaccination or by infection.

For those who are already fully vaccinated, the CDC recommends a booster dose only after six months to counteract the waning of protective immunity against severe disease, having reasoned that loss of protection against infection was not a sufficient reason to start recommending boosters.

By contrast, the CDC recommends those with natural immunity boost their protection against reinfection by getting vaccinated any time after recovering from their primary infection. Even though natural immunity is much more durable than that induced by the vaccines, the CDC does not advise waiting six months after recovery to get vaccinated.

It is completely unscientific for the CDC to have adopted these two different standards.

If its recommendation were based on the scientific evidence rather than the policy goal of achieving higher vaccination rates, the CDC would have long ago started telling people who have already recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection that they now have natural immunity, which we know to be superior to the immunity induced by vaccines, with much more durable protection against reinfection; and that since there is no evidence of waning protection against severe disease with natural immunity, unlike with vaccine-induced immunity, there is not yet a strong logical rationale for them to consider accepting the evidently unnecessary risk of vaccination.

Addendum

Update, February 11, 2022: After publishing this article, I shared it on all my social media profiles. Proving my point about how social media companies liked Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are censoring truth that doesn’t align with the political agenda of maximizing COVID-19 vaccine uptake even among those who are already naturally immune, LinkedIn immediately removed my post on the grounds that it violated their community guidelines. Here is the now-removed post:

linked in censorship

The only possibly relevant part of the LinkedIn community policy page states:

Do not share false or misleading content: Do not share content in a way that you know is, or think may be, misleading or inaccurate, including misinformation or disinformation. Do not share content to interfere with or improperly influence an election or another civic process. We may prevent you from posting content from sites that are known to produce or contain misinformation. Do not share content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.

Of course, this is pure hypocrisy. False or misleading content is just fine with these social media companies if the source of the disinformation is the CDC. But it is totally unacceptable to the thought-controllers for you to cite the medical literature and accurately report what the science says, including by showing how the CDC’s own published data directly contradicts its claims and policies.

I rest my case.

On a somewhat related note, after sharing that exact same post on Twitter, I retweeted it to tag several scientists and researchers, inviting them to read my analysis and welcoming any corrections. Among them was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the famed authors of the important Great Barrington Declaration, who shared my article with this comment:

We can and must overcome the censorship of truth. Please share this important information with your friends, family, and social media followers!

Update, July 16, 2022: I recently had my account suspended by LinkedIn for repeatedly sharing this very article, which they alleged violates their user agreement prohibiting the spread of misinformation. Despite repeated requests for LinkedIn to specify what information in either my social media posts or this article they were alleging to be false or misleading, LinkedIn refused to even attempt to identify any untruths on my part.

When I asked LinkedIn whether their guidelines prohibited me from sharing factually accurate information that corrected disinformation from the public health authorities, LinkedIn informed me that they will not provide any interpretation of their guidelines! They thus refused to deny that they had banned me precisely because I was debunking official disinformation.

I appealed on the grounds that my suspension was based on a false pretext, maintaining that my posts contained only factually accurate information. LinkedIn eventually ended the suspension while persisting in its unsubstantiated accusation against me, whereas I put them on notice that they had violated their user agreement with my by suspending my account on false pretexts, and that they had also violated my right to free speech and freedom of the press by acting as a proxy government agent in censoring truths that don’t align with the government’s policy aims.

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  • JT Weaver says:

    Thank you for using that nasty word (lie) so seldom associated with government activity. Their euphemisms, usually intended to cover up their malfeasance, are so transparent as to be ludicrous.

  • DPCannon says:

    Kudos Jeremy. …as usual very thorough.

    Pandemic Logic Cheat-sheet Syllogism:

    We must do something:
    X is something.
    So we must do X.

    Circular:
    X is desirable because X works.
    We know X works because X is desirable.

    Post-Hoc:
    X is followed by desired outcome. Continue X.
    X not followed by desired outcome. Increase X.

  • Ross says:

    So infection confers immunity across variants? Many ask about that.

    • Yes. Variants can “escape” sterilizing immunity, meaning protection against infection due to circulating antibodies, to one extent or another. People with natural immunity may become reinfected. The cellular immunity that is induced with natural immunity is protective across variants, so that a reinfection with an escape variant is more likely to be asymptomatic or mild.

  • Louis Lamontagne says:

    Hello, it seems to be a very good article, but even being a unvaccinated and having published on the subject during the two years of the pandemic, I cannot go through these long messages, that say again and again that we were lied to constantly during the pandemic, by the public authorities in charge of protecting us and nothing happens. The public has given up control of their lives and the authorities, I feel, can do what they want, under the guidance of the rich and powerful. Gazoline at over $2 a liter in Canada is one sure sign and the price of food are hitting the weakest the hardest and no one will step up for them. Sad times with no end in sight.

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