Latest misleading CDC Vaccine Claim
Covid-19 Vaccination DOES NOT provide superior protection than prior infection
Is vaccination against covid-19 superior to natural infection? The press has been reporting this dubious claim based on two recent CDC reports (1 and 2). And Google is supporting the approved narrative of course.
Why does this matter? If, as all prior research on this issue shows, that natural immunity from a prior covid infection is FAR superior to the vaccine at preventing future cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, covid-19 vaccine mandates without exceptions for the previously infected lose legitimacy (forcing potentially harmful shots with negligible benefit). Combined with the fact that it is difficult to implement vaccine mandates with prior infection exceptions, there is a great incentive for those government officials seeking mandates, and in particular at the CDC, to falsely claim that vaccines are superior to natural immunity. And that's exactly what they've done! Exposing this kind of crappy science is the raison d'etre of the Pure Science substack.
The aforementioned CDC reports are extremely opaque, probably deliberately so. The CDC report released in August breathlessly claims “Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection”. But if one reads the actual report we find a much weaker claim: researchers found that among patients hospitalized with covid-19, those that received the vaccine after the hospitalization were less likely to get re-infected with covid than those that didn’t. This is not surprising and consistent with the much higher quality research from Israel that I will discuss shortly, as vaccines do reduce the chance of symptomatic covid, even for the previously infected. However, this is not the same as comparing the chance of a previously infected individual becoming re-infected with covid with another individual who was never infected but has received the vaccine. The chance of a previously infected person getting re-infected and having life threatening covid is negligibly small by all accounts - thus the benefit of the vaccine to the previously infected is negligible as well.
The more recent CDC report is even more opaque with a nonsensical methodology. After much deconstruction of the contents of the paper it appears the authors are comparing ratios of vaccinated and unvaccinated hospitalized patients with covid-19 like symptoms (on their hospitalization report) that actually have a positive covid-19 test results??? The authors claim to have controlled the analysis for confounding factors but the data in the paper shows otherwise. As you can see below, the authors report that 6,328 of the 7,348 patients with covid-19 symptoms were vaccinated! However, the authors report that only 5% of the vaccinated hospital patients with covid-19 like symptoms actually have covid (compared to 9% of unvaccinated) and therefore the vaccine works much better than natural infection. The two groups have vastly different age, date of infection/vaccination, and location distributions. Absolutely junk science logic!
Contrast this nonsensical conclusion with the far superior analysis and reporting from Israel. The researchers matched up over 16,000 vaccinated individuals with corresponding unvaccinated individuals with similar ages, sex, social economic status, and infection or vaccination date. The researchers found that the vaccinated individuals were approximately 13 times more likely to become infected with symptomatic covid-19!! The vaccinated individuals were also more likely to be hospitalized with covid, but due to the small number of people hospitalized in both groups the uncertainty of that conclusion is large.
I am not advocating that people choose to develop immunity to covid-19 the old-fashioned way. There is no doubt that covid-19 vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and they are appropriate for most people. Covid-19 vaccine mandates face legal and moral dilemmas such as weighting the possible benefit to the group versus the rights of the individual, including body autonomy. I'll leave discussions of those topics to others. But based on the facts presented herein, it is rational to conclude that any covid-19 vaccination mandate without exceptions for the previously infected lacks legitimacy.