NPR Whitewashes the CDC’s Lies about Natural Immunity

Introduction

Recently, CDC researchers published a study showing that people with natural immunity had better protection against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, than people who were fully vaccinated.

The authors of the study acknowledged that natural immunity offered superior protection against infection as well as against severe disease. The CDC’s press release about the study likewise admitted that this was what the data showed.

This admission marked a reversal for the CDC, which had previously been maintaining that the immunity induced by vaccines is superior to the immunity induced by infection.

Since the start of the government’s mass vaccination campaign, the CDC has maintained that people who have recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection still need to get vaccinated.

At first, the reason the CDC provided for this recommendation was that the evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived.

But less than a month after the COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the CDC stopped making that claim. Instead, the CDC began insisting that everyone who had already recovered from infection still needed to get vaccinated because it wasn’t known how long natural immunity would last.

The CDC maintained that position, which implied that there was no scientific evidence to support the conclusion that natural immunity would be durable, until August 2021. At that time, the CDC stopped implying that natural immunity was weak and inferior to the immunity induced by vaccines. Instead, the CDC began explicitly proclaiming that vaccine-induced immunity was superior.

Naturally, the CDC’s recent reversal from that position poses a conundrum for the mainstream media, which have consistently treated the CDC’s proclamations as gospel truth.

Indeed, social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have relied on “public health” authorities as well as the mainstream media’s faux “fact checkers” to justify the removal of posts presenting information that contradicted the CDC’s now-admittedly-false claims about natural immunity.

We should not expect mainstream media sources to rush to report how the CDC had long been lying to the public. We should not be too surprised when, instead, the media attempt to whitewash the CDC’s dishonesty by claiming that the CDC has shifted its position on natural immunity because the science has changed.

This reversal, we are supposed to believe, is simply a result of the CDC honestly looking at the science and being reasonable enough to change its position as scientists acquire more knowledge that overturns previously held beliefs.

This is a familiar propaganda tactic.

Prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the government had claimed that Iraq was maintaining stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), had active production facilities to produce WMD, and had an operative relationship with Al Qaeda, the terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

After Iraq had been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, and the entire Middle East destabilized, the CIA admitted that Iraq had been disarmed by the UN back in 1991.

Rather than honestly reporting that the government had lied to the public, the media helped the government propagate the false narrative that there had been an “intelligence failure”.

That is equivalent to what the media are now trying to do in light of the CDC’s acknowledgment that natural immunity is superior.

The CDC’s own data has literally falsified a claim that the CDC had been making with the specific intent of persuading people who were already immune to get vaccinated, and yet the media are refusing to just come out and state plainly that the CDC has been lying.

Instead, the new narrative being pushed is that “the science has changed”, and so the CDC, by recently acknowledging the superiority of natural immunity, has simply updated its position based on brand new information that was not previously available.

The main problem with this new media narrative, like the narrative that preceded it, is that it is demonstrably false.

This new narrative has nothing to do with journalism. It is strictly propaganda, intended to maintain the false perception among the public that the CDC is a credible and trustworthy source of information.

The truth is that the science has not changed. The reality is that, to the contrary, the scientific evidence has continued to mount confirming what we already knew: that the immunity induced by vaccines is inferior to that induced by infection, and that natural immunity is in fact robust, broad, and durable.

That should hardly be revelatory knowledge. It shouldn’t be surprising to anybody. Indeed, it is precisely what we would expect given what we have long known about immunology.

Yet, the media are now trying to gaslight us by falsely claiming that the CDC made a reasonable and innocent mistake, that it is only with the benefit of hindsight, with new advances in scientific knowledge, that we can understand why earlier conclusions that natural immunity is short-lived were wrong.

An NPR article published on February 7, 2022, offers an insightful example of a vain attempt to whitewash the fact that the CDC deliberately lied to the public.