> The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label. The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.
The vast majority of people testing positive for the virus are not dying from it.
> 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.
The comment to which I'm responding said there's little evidence that natural immunity is better than vaccines. That's just not true. There's pretty strong evidence, actually.
That natural immunity plus a booster is better than either is interesting, but not responsive to the question.
Yes, they did this, and showed that natural infection was superior to vaccination alone.
> but not (yet) infected.
Incorrect.
> Note the "previously infected" category did not exclude the vaccinated, but the vaccinated category did exclude the previously infected.
No. You only have to read the link to see that your understanding of the study is entirely incorrect.
> The study...found in two analyses that never-infected people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.
> 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.
"the higher hospitalization rate in the 32,000-person analysis was based on just eight hospitalizations in a vaccinated group and one in a previously infected group. And the 13-fold increased risk of infection in the same analysis was based on just 238 infections in the vaccinated population, less than 1.5% of the more than 16,000 people, versus 19 reinfections among a similar number of people who once had SARS-CoV-2."
These numbers are very small for distinguishing between the effectiveness of two different and effective immunization methods (natural and vaccine). By now, we should have more data to support if the effect size is that strong. Do we?
Nobody in their right mind would choose such a tradeoff.
The point is: people who have recovered from the illness are immune, and should be treated as such.
I'm not sure the guy on the street is actually interested in properly understanding the risks associated with Covid.
My neighbour is in his 70s, he had Covid in November 2020 and (in his words) he wasn't particularly poorly with it. He subsequently had his vaccinations.
He and a couple of friends have been having blood tests to check on antibody titres. His antibodies are still really high, his friends (who haven't had Covid) have antibodies which have dropped significantly since they were vaccinated. He told me he wasn't sure why.
We were talking out on the street, my kids were out and around on their bikes, he told me he thought it was really important that children (like mine) should get vaccinated in order to keep people like him "safe".
What do you say at that point? I'm honestly not sure where we go from here.
You should check the number of deaths in the original trials used to approve the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. You might be surprised. Even in big trials in immunologically naive populations, only a small number of people became seriously ill -- a total of 10 people became seriously ill across the entire Pfizer trial. No deaths occurred. [1]
Once you've vaccinated your population (or otherwise allowed them to become immune), you're talking about incredibly small effect sizes.
This is a very strong claim to make without any evidence or proof.
To the contrary, there is strong evidence that natural infection brings considerably better immunity than any vaccination does. [0]
Study analyzed:
> 2.5 million people in Israel, spanning March 1st 2020 to August 14th 2021.
Full study can be read in detail: [1]
[0] https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/312538 [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
Being vaccinated and then boosted offers as worst equal protection, probably better, against infection and disease, with much much lower risk of side effects, serious disease, long covid or death.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7044e1-H.pdf
It basically says unvaccinated people who are already or recently sick (with any "covid-like" symptoms) are more likely to go to the hospital once they catch covid (vs vaccinated). (Duh.)
Worse, it presumes any of those sick people with respiratory symptoms had natural immunity to covid without any confirmation.
So it's not comparing natural immunity to vaccinated immunity, but vaccinated individuals vs anybody-unvaccinated-thats-been-sick-with-anything-in-the-last-6-months.
Put another way, it presumes any "covid-like" symptoms results in natural immunity to covid, then puts that assumption to the test.
And instead of admitting it's a bad assumption and that most of this group didn't previously have covid, they attribute it to natural immunity not being effective.
I’m not suggesting it is a perfect study, but the methodology makes sense. The point is that if somebody gets hospitalized for covid-like sickness, then they’ll be hospitalized (and trackable), and they hope that is a stable cohort.
So you start with hospitalized patients with covid-like symptoms, then look among them and see who was vaccinated (and when), vs who previously had covid (and when), and then by looking at the percentage of cases caused by covid you are attempting to effectively compare the susceptibility to covid in the broader population. It works as long as the person is getting all of their medical care in your system and you have full tracking of them (which they do in the study).
And again, it isn’t perfect but there is no perfect study for this. And when they redo the study with boosters whatever the result is we know the real world effectiveness of boosters is 10x non-boosted do the results would be even better.
They claim to be comparing efficacy of natural immunity to that of vaccination, but they're not. They're not really "measuring" prior natural immunity at all, but just assuming it's there.
How's that misinterpreted?
That's not even close to "not a perfect study".
Yet it's being presented, like here, as evidence against the efficacy of natural immunity, which is something it's not, and as being applicable to the general public, when the sample population is self-selected to be only the sickest of the sick (2 hospital visits in a year).
> presumes any of those sick people with respiratory symptoms had natural immunity to covid without any confirmation.
This is an accurate statement to make about the study. Until you can effectively prove somehow this is not the case, it's only you who
> shows your internal bias in this matter
Do you genuinely believe a study with such a massive and obvious methodology problem would get published and cited by the CDC? (and yes I know bad studies do get published from time to time but it isn’t common).
The criteria for inclusion in the study:
> Hospitalized adults aged ≥18 years with COVID-19–like illness were included if they had received testing at least twice: once associated with a COVID-19–like illness hospitalization during January–September 2021 and at least once earlier (since February 1, 2020, and ≥14 days before that hospitalization).
This is a terrible methodology. It says nothing of a positive or negative test result, and the duration of time in between hospitalization and testing is absurdly arbitrary. It is simply assumed to be a COVID infection with no reasoning for this decision.
We've then got this nugget:
> Laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection was identi-fied among 324 (5.1%) of 6,328 fully vaccinated persons and among 89 of 1,020 (8.7%) unvaccinated, previously infected persons
Perhaps they should have found 5,000 more unvaccinated people before concluding their study. They are not hard to find.
> Do you genuinely believe a study with such a massive and obvious methodology problem would get published and cited by the CDC?
This is a joke, right? The CDC are frequently derided for their terrible methodologies and this goes back for decades. Not an uncommon outcome where you are an inherently political organization that is also in charge of distributing enormous sums for research funding. So of course, I would expect a terrible study like this from the CDC.
You're actually going to compare this crap-tastic shitfest of a study with the rock-solid study I provided, containing ~3mil participants and a far more verbose & informative outline of the study's methodology?
> Previous infection was ascertained based on SARS-CoV-2 testing from rapid antigen tests or molecular assays (e.g., real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) performed before mRNA vaccination and ≥14 days before admission; testing performed after February 2020 was primarily within network partners’ medical facilities.
This is why it’s recommended for people to get vaccinated even after infection. They might already have robust immunity, or they might not. The vaccines are so incredibly safe and cheap it’s simply not worth the risk.
Agreed. However, many people are not in that position. For those who have been infected but not vaccinated, they have experienced immune systems and must evaluate information from that starting point.
I am in relatively lower risk group, and in good health. I got it and recovered on my own. I got blood test and have Dr. letter to prove it.
It appears I now have sterilizing immunity, which is not available with the present vaccines. I suggest sterilizing immunity is better for everyone around me.
Given the strains circulating now I don’t think your concern is valid. Vaccines are better and less risky than having your naive immune system deal with covid. Maybe that will change with a future strain (though I’d bet against it), but it isn’t the case now.