A few weeks ago on X (formerly Twitter), I confronted Dr. Dan Wilson, a.k.a. “Debunk the Funk”, about his claim that “Vaccination is better than natural immunity”. Someone else then jumped into the thread trying to defend Debunk’s claim by asserting that my opposing claim, that natural immunity is superior to that induced by mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines, “has no basis in reality”.
Having written an entire series of lengthy articles reviewing in great detail what was known from the scientific literature about natural immunity in comparison to the inferior immunity induced by mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines, I recognized that empty rebuttal as absurd; and so I replied, “It is absurd to say that my observation of the superiority of natural immunity ‘has no basis in reality’.”
I viewed that response as sufficient. Willful ignorance, after all, is not an argument.
Debunk then came back with the rhetorical question, “Are you still in this thread not providing any substance?”
To which I responded in kind, “Are you still in this thread stupidly trying to maintain that natural immunity is inferior?”
Demonstrating either feigned or real ignorance of the scientific literature, Debunk replied, “Yep. Waiting for you to provide evidence to the contrary.”
Having neither the need nor desire to engage in a futile attempt to reason with a person persisting in such deliberate obliviousness, I replied, “I am satisfied with your acknowledgment that you persist in your claim that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is inferior. Thanks.”
Then another individual, evidently weighing in to support my position, replied to share an article from Science magazine titled “Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine—but vaccination remains vital”.
It was an article I was intimately familiar with. In fact, Science had published an ostensible “correction” to the article because of an error that I had pointed out to them.
However, they never actually corrected the error that I identified. Instead, they made an insignificant edit that continued to deceive readers.
So, here is how I replied to the person who’d shared the Science article:
Thank you. I am familiar with that Science article. In fact, I am the person responsible for getting them to print their ostensible “clarification”, which doesn't actually fix the problem of them lying about the study.
Tellingly, neither “Debunk the Funk” nor his defender responded to further challenge me.
It was true, of course, that the study referenced in the Science article did show that natural immunity is vastly superior.
But the author, Meredith Wadman (@meredithwadman), had also falsely claimed that the study showed that people who had already acquired natural immunity gained an additional benefit from subsequently getting an mRNA COVID19 vaccine.
The study in question, conducted by Israeli researchers, was titled “Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections”, published on the preprint server medRxiv on August 25, 2021.
It was subsequently peer-reviewed and published on April 5, 2022, in Clinical Infectious Diseases under the title “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Naturally Acquired Immunity versus Vaccine-induced Immunity, Reinfections versus Breakthrough Infections: A Retrospective Cohort Study”.
As originally published, the Science article was titled “Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine—but no infection parties, please”. That version of the article had stated,
The researchers also found that people who had SARS-CoV-2 previously and then received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine were more highly protected against reinfection than those who once had the virus and were still unvaccinated.
But that was false.
That conclusion could not be drawn because the result for the secondary analysis, in which vaccination occurred after recovery from infection, was statistically insignificant, as I pointed out to Wadman on Twitter (as it was called then, and as I have persisted in calling it as long as the domain name remained “twitter.com”, which I found just today was finally changed to “x.com”).
Wadman replied to me the next day to say, “Thanks for the catch. We have corrected the story.”
So, I checked the story to ensure that it had been corrected. It had not been.
The article continued to falsely claim,
The researchers also found that people who had SARS-CoV-2 previously and received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine were more highly protected against reinfection than those who once had the virus and were still unvaccinated.
Did you spot their supposed “correction”?
Okay, I’ll point it out for you: they removed the word “then”. Here’s the original version again with the deleted word in bold so you can see what I mean:
The researchers also found that people who had SARS-CoV-2 previously and then received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine were more highly protected against reinfection than those who once had the virus and were still unvaccinated.
See, the study’s secondary analysis had looked at outcomes for individuals who had what is known as “hybrid” immunity, which refers to having both been vaccinated and having recovered from an infection.
The order in which those antigen exposures occurred matters!
But Science magazine, evidently assuming that you are stupid, would have you believe otherwise. (I do not share their belief that you, dear reader, are stupid.)
To reiterate, Science magazine’s original claim was that people who had already acquired natural immunity benefited from subsequently getting vaccinated. That was untrue because that result was not statistically significant, meaning that it could just as well be attributed to random chance as to an actual effect of having been vaccinated after recovering from infection. There was no significant benefit of vaccination for people who had already acquired natural immunity.
The magazine’s deletion of the word “then” still left the word “previously”, thus deliberately deceiving readers into believing that the study showed a significant benefit of vaccination for people who had already acquired natural immunity.
The statistically significant finding that Science was actually referring to with its ostensible “correction” was entirely attributable the natural booster effect of experiencing a “breakthrough” infection among people whose initial exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was from getting vaccinated.
In other words, getting infected after getting vaccinated—and surviving that “breakthrough” infection—did confer an additional immunological benefit; but my point remained true that getting vaccinated after immune priming by natural infection did not.
So, I replied to Wadman to point out that their insignificant edit had not corrected their false claim:
No, you did not correct it. You just deleted “then” so that instead of your statement being outright false, it is now just highly misleading. You need to tell the truth: people who had infection THEN got vaccinated were NOT shown to have received a benefit from the shot.
Incredibly, Wadman then had the gall to accuse me of being intellectually dishonest! Demonstrating extraordinary hypocrisy, she replied,
@JeremyrHammond you read the paper so you're aware that 81% of the "infected and once vaccinated" group were vaccinated after being infected. Even if this were not so, the article is accurate as corrected. You are looking for an agenda where there is none.
To which I responded that she was most certainly serving an agenda by still deceitfully leading her readers to the conclusion that people who had already acquiring natural immunity received a significant benefit from subsequently getting vaccinated.
I additionally replied in kind,
You read the paper, so you're aware that when the analysis was narrowed to that 81%, the result was statistically insignificant! You are misleading your readers into believing that the study showed a benefit of vaccinating people with natural immunity when it did not.
I further observed how her deception could only have been deliberate.
She declined to reply to me any further, and the Science article was never actually corrected. To this day, it continues to lie that people “previously” infected who received a COVID‑19 vaccine “were more highly protected against reinfection than those who once had the virus and were still unvaccinated.”
You just cannot get more deliberately deceptive than that.
Meredith Wadman’s initial false claim could have been attributed to simple error, but her ostensible “correction” that left the same falsehood intact can only be attributed to an intent to deceive.
My exposure of Science magazine’s willful lie was noticed by Sharyl Attkisson, who is among the rare honest journalists. In an article titled “CDC hiding the number of naturally-immune to Covid-19”, Attkisson referenced me by reporting (emphasis added),
In August, Meredith Wadman falsely wrote in the journal Science that a study showed those who were infected with Covid-19 and gained natural immunity still benefitted from vaccination afterwards. When the untrue information was flagged by a reader, Science deleted it and posted a clarification.
No word on how the fabricated science could have gotten inserted in the article.
What Attkisson unfortunately didn’t explain is how the supposed “clarification” remained a fabrication of science.
Meredith Wadman is a liar. Feel free to share this post with @meredithwadman to demand that she and @ScienceMagazine acknowledge and correct their disinformation.
Share it with everyone else, too, so they can come to an understanding of how they are incessantly lied to about vaccines by the mainstream media, which in doing so are simply following the example set by “public health authorities” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC.
Insist that they tell the truth that the study not only showed that natural immunity vastly superior, but that it also showed that getting vaccinated after having acquired natural immunity conferred no significant benefit.
Maybe together we can manage to achieve some small measure of accountability for all the lies we’ve been incessantly bombarded with by the government, the mainstream media, and the entire so-called “public health” establishment.
I can’t do it without you! I’ll stop writing now so you can get to it.
(And remember, it is not only the COVID‑19 vaccines that the government and mainstream media have been lying to you about.)
For further reading about the superiority of natural immunity:
The bias in these medical mafia folks is so obvious looking at their field of work. After you so carefully displayed both her lack of knowledge and then deceit its pure amusement wondering what farcical gibberish lies within the covers of this masterpiece:
http://meredithwadman.com/the-vaccine-race/
Its become very tiring how the lies and deceit just keep getting pushed out the door from such esteemed individuals and yet when confronted with their lies they just move on to their next awards in the corrupted cesspool of health care.
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