Table of Contents
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.
How NPR Defends the CDC by Ignoring A Year-And-A-Half of Science
The NPR article, titled “The future of the pandemic is looking clearer as we learn more about infection”, begins by noting how, back in July 2020, media reports proclaimed that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, appeared to be short-lived. To illustrate, NPR provided the example of a Guardian headline proclaiming: “Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests”.
That Guardian headline was based on a finding of “steep drops in patients’ antibody levels” during the first three months after recovery from infection.
The NPR article continues:
But that idea was based on preliminary data from the laboratory — and on a faulty understanding of how the immune system works. Now about a year and a half later, better data is painting a more optimistic picture about immunity after a bout of COVID-19. In fact, a symptomatic infection triggers a remarkable immune response in the general population, likely offering protection against severe disease and death for a few years.
This is laughable!
Implicitly, NPR is claiming that scientists did not know a year and a half ago that a rapid loss of antibodies from peak levels reached after an acute infection was normal and did not mean that people were losing their immunity.
Implicitly, NPR is claiming that immunologists have only recently discovered this.
What ridiculous nonsense!
The truth, of course, is that basic immunology already told us back in July 2020 that the claim that waning antibodies equaled loss of immunity was false.
NPR is implicitly claiming that the Guardian headline truly represented the state of immunological knowledge a year and a half ago. But that is false.
The truth is that such headlines were anti-science propaganda, as I have documented extensively in my series of articles exposing the “public health” establishment’s and mainstream media’s persistent disinformation about natural immunity.
See in particular my articles “The Lie That Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Is Weak and Short-Lived”, “The Origins of the Lie That Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Wanes Rapidly”, and “Waning Antibodies ≠ Loss of Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2”, all of which were written, you will note, prior to the science supposedly having changed.
And, no, those articles were not the product of some incredible foresight on my part! I had simply been reading the scientific literature and reporting the stark contrast between what the science actually said and the blatant lies we were told by “public health” authorities and the mainstream media.
To briefly review a few key points highlighted in that article series, when the COVID-19 vaccines were first authorized for emergency use in December 2020 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the CDC claimed that the evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived.
In fact, by that time, studies had already shown that, after a normal and expected decline from peak levels, antibody levels plateaued and persisted in the vast majority of people who recovered from infection.
Additionally, in some individuals, antibody levels were even observed to increase between three to four months post-infection, indicating a shift in antibody production from short-lived plasmablasts to long-lived bone marrow plasma cells, which are a known immunological marker of long-term immunity.
By May 2021, scientists had confirmed that infection induced durable immunologic memory with differentiation of memory B cells into long-lived bone marrow plasma cells capable of rapidly churning out neutralizing antibodies in the event of reexposure to SARS-CoV-2.
Nevertheless, the CDC persisted in deceiving the public by proclaiming that people who had already recovered from infection also needed to get fully vaccinated on the grounds that natural immunity might be weak and short-lived.
The CDC deliberately withheld from the public the fact that studies had already shown that natural immunity was very likely to be long-lived.
To illustrate how the CDC was simply not being honest with the public, compare the CDC’s public messaging with the title of an article in Nature reporting the confirmation of long-term immunologic memory: “Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime.”
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, the CDC persisted in deliberately withholding from the public the overwhelming scientific evidence that natural immunity was robust, broad, and durable. Implicit in its messaging was the false claim that the vaccines induce immune responses that are more protective than natural immunity.
Then, in August, the CDC started explicitly claiming that natural immunity is inferior.
That claim was starkly contrasted at the time by the evidence already contained in the scientific literature.
Studies had already shown that neutralizing antibodies were more persistent in people with natural immunity compared with fully vaccinated people.
Less than a week after the CDC started claiming that vaccine induced superior immunity, a large population study in Israel was published on the preprint server medRxiv showing that fully vaccinated individuals had a thirteen-fold greater risk of infection with the Delta variant than people with natural immunity.
Yet, the CDC persisted in its claim that natural immunity was inferior. Since the CDC couldn’t find any studies in the scientific literature to support its position on natural immunity, it had to come up with its own.
As noted by researchers from Cleveland Clinic in another recent study once again affirming that natural immunity offered better protection against the Delta variant, the CDC cited a single flawed study to support its claim. That study was conducted by—who else?—the CDC!
How NPR Defends the CDC While Demolishing the Rationale for CDC Policy
Let’s return to the NPR propaganda. First, the article implicitly communicates the ridiculous falsehood that immunologists have only just recently discovered that it is normal for there to be an initial waning of antibodies from peak levels. NPR would have us believe that scientists didn’t already know that such waning of antibodies does not mean that people are losing their immunity.
After propagating that ridiculous disinformation, NPR persists in parroting yet another claim from the CDC that happens to be contradicted by the CDC’s own data.
NPR asserts that if you get vaccinated after recovering from infection, “your protection is likely even better, studies are consistently showing.”
To support that statement, NPR cites the recent study by CDC researchers in which they acknowledged that, yes, natural immunity did offer better protection against the Delta variant than vaccine-induced immunity.
However, NPR does not report that finding. Instead, the NPR article continues:
In that study, a prior infection reduced the risk of hospitalization during the delta surge by more than 50 times compared with in people who hadn’t had a prior infection and were not vaccinated. People who had had both a prior infection and were vaccinated had the most protection.
There are two remarkable points to be made about this reporting from NPR.
First, it is astonishing that NPR omits the key finding from that CDC study that people with natural immunity not only fared better than unvaccinated people without prior infection but also better than fully vaccinated people.
Indeed, an acknowledgment that the CDC has recently admitted that natural immunity offered superior protection against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is curiously absent from the NPR article.
Instead, NPR tries to characterize the situation as one in which there has only been an acknowledgement that natural immunity exists and is pretty good. The admission that vaccine-induced immunity is inferior is not forthcoming, despite the data.
The second remarkable point to be made about the NPR’s reporting is that NPR is lying.
How NPR Lies to Defend CDC Policy
Specifically, it is not true that the CDC study showed that people who had a prior infection and got vaccinated had significantly greater protection against hospitalization than unvaccinated people with natural immunity.
Here is a graphical illustration of the data from the CDC study:
As you can see, the people who had the lowest risk for hospitalization with COVID-19 were people who had recovered from a prior infection, with or without subsequent vaccination.
NPR is claiming that, among those with prior infection, those who were also vaccinated had significantly greater protection than those who remained unvaccinated. That is false.
Here is the relevant data, from Table 2 of the paper:
What you are looking at is the data on protectiveness against COVID-19 hospitalization at two-week time intervals. For each interval, hazard ratios are presented, which represent how much greater risk of hospitalization immunologically naïve individuals had relative to three different groups.
The leftmost hazard ratios are for vaccinated people with no previous COVID-19 diagnosis. I’ve outlined the two columns we want to look at with the red box. These are the two columns for people who had recovered from a prior infection, i.e., people who had acquired natural immunity.
The left column is for those who never got vaccinated, whereas the right column is for those who did.
To the right of each hazard ratio, in parentheses, are the 95% confidence intervals. As you can see, the confidence intervals between the two groups in each instance are overlapping. What this means in scientific parlance is that the differences in protection against hospitalization between the vaccinated and unvaccinated are not statistically significant.
The recent study by Cleveland Clinic researchers, incidentally, also found no significant benefit of vaccination in terms of protection against severe disease for people who had already recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection.
(To learn more about that, see my article “The CDC Finally Admits That Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Is Superior to the Immunity Induced by COVID-19 Vaccines”.)
Immediately after falsely claiming that vaccination conferred significant additional protection against hospitalization compared to natural immunity alone, NPR asserts that another study showed that “This protection against severe disease persists, perhaps for years.” (Emphasis added.)
NPR quotes one of the authors of that study saying, “We’ve been following this same group of people for over a year and a half now, we don’t see much waning. If it’s there, it’s too small to discern.” (Emphasis added.)
In context, “this protection” and “this same group of people” must mean people who got vaccinated after recovering from infection. Thusly, NPR deceives readers into concluding that the study in question has been following a group of people who recovered from infection and then were vaccinated.
In fact, that study, the findings of which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on December 23, 2021, looked only at people with natural immunity. People who had a prior infection and got vaccinated were excluded from the study!
In that paper, researchers observed that reinfections “were rare and were generally mild”.
Out of 1,304 reinfections identified, they found that people with natural immunity had 88% lower odds of developing severe disease, with zero cases of reinfection progressing to critical disease and zero cases resulting in death (which is to say, 100% lower odds of these outcomes).
Noting that they had previously estimated natural immunity to be 85% effective at preventing reinfection, they concluded that “the risk of having a severe reinfection is only approximately 1% of the risk of a previously uninfected person having a severe primary infection.”
Contrary to the false conclusion NPR leaves its readers to draw, that study said nothing about vaccination offering a significant benefit for people who already have natural immunity.
How NPR Cites Science Contradicting CDC Policy
The NPR article goes on to accurately report how, with natural immunity, antibodies are remarkably persistent in the blood of most people who recover from SARS-CoV-2 infection, how infection induces long-lived plasma cells “that can make potent antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, for decades, possibly even a lifetime”, and how there are also T cell responses that help limit a reinfection and protect against severe disease.
However, NPR reports these facts as though they were all new discoveries, which is false.
In fact, all this scientific knowledge was already known throughout the time that the CDC persisted in its characterization of natural immunity as weak, short-lived, and inferior to the immunity induced by vaccines.
The NPR article also illustrates the remarkable shift in narrative that has been necessitated by the data showing that it is vaccine-induced immunity that wanes rapidly.
Remember, the mass vaccination campaign was originally sold to the public on the grounds that COVID-19 vaccines would help end the pandemic by stopping infection and transmission and thereby conferring herd immunity.
For well over a year now, we have been repeatedly told that, even if we have already recovered from infection, we still need to get vaccinated to prevent reinfection.
For month after month since the vaccines first became available, we have been bombarded with the message that everyone, including those with natural immunity, need to get vaccinated to reduce COVID-19 case numbers as measured by PCR testing, regardless of whether positive tests represent people who actually have the clinical disease.
But now that the vaccines have been proven highly ineffective at preventing infection and transmission, suddenly, we are being told that preventing infection isn’t so important; it’s preventing severe disease that really counts!
As NPR now explains, “In essence, your immune system is allocating resources. And its primary goal is to keep you alive. So the immune system has decided that, with coronaviruses, it’s not worth stopping the infection as long as it can stop serious, life-threatening illness.”
NPR quotes Jonathan Yewdell, a researcher from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), explaining, “But as long as you’ve recovered . . . you know, mission accomplished.”
The NPR article concludes:
In other words, the immune system is not built to stop every sickness or asymptomatic infection. And it’s definitely not built to “give you a negative PCR test,” Yewdell says.
So the future of COVID-19 is starting to become clearer: We’re going to have a lot more infections but hopefully a lot fewer hospitalizations and deaths.
What NPR fails to point out is that this explanation of how the important thing is prevention of severe disease and not necessarily stopping every reinfection completely obliterates the whole logical rationale for vaccinating people who have already recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Hence the necessity of the NPR’s blatant lie that the CDC study showed that vaccination conferred a significant additional benefit in terms of greater protection against hospitalization compared with natural immunity alone.
Conclusion
Contrary to the false narrative the media are now trying to perpetrate against us, the science has not changed.
Rather, the mounting scientific evidence simply continues to confirm what we have already long known, which is that the immunity induced by infection is superior to the immunity induced by COVID-19 vaccines.
For more information and thorough documentation about how the “public health” establishment and the media from the very start have been blatantly lying to the public about the scientific evidence, see the overview page for my series of articles exposing their incessant deceptions: “The Superiority of Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2”.
Don’t let them gaslight you! The science has not changed. They were just always lying to you. And they are still lying to you.
