Natural Immunity

[Robert]

Lots of politics but some good facts too.

[temporal1]

Lots of politics
but some good facts too.

i’m not a Rand Paul follower, i fail to see politics in this clip.

i see requests for credentials, then inquiries about (balanced) scientific basis for gov to demand vaccinations with devastating penalties for non-compliance. i don’t see anything partisan.

HHS Sec Becerra appears to be working in public relations, with a law degree.

Xavier Becerra is an American politician and lawyer serving as the 25th United States secretary of health and human services.
Becerra previously served as the attorney general of California from January 2017 until March 2021.
wiki

- - -

Partisan politics is PUBLIC RELATIONS, not science. (Not ok.)

Public Relations: obama appointed RON KLAIN to lead the fray on Ebola; RK’s career should have ended with the Solyndra failure.
Instead, RK’s public relations career has risen exponentially. No shame.

2014 / “Ron Klain and Solyndra / The administration’s point man on a solar fraud is now in charge of Ebola”
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/10/ ... -mccarthy/

Ron Klain is the ugly face of partisan politics. He is soaring in the biden admin.

[Bootstrap]

I am responding to an earlier post as requested by a few members.

Could you please quote the part from the Israel study that says the opposite? That's the other study you have mentioned so frequently. Can you admit that it does? Any particular reason that you did not even mention the Israel study in your response to the message where I bring it up?

For context, the Israel study is here:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.full.pdf

Here is the conclusion of the study:

This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.

Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.

Here's Nett's response. My responses inline.

Ok, I'll give it a shot.

First I did not distinguish between positive baseline N-binding antibody test and positive nucleic acid amplification test. Differentiating them does not result in enough incidents to be statistically significant.

here are the relevant incidences of reinfection among placebo and vaccinated populations from the 6 month study

16/716 placebo = 0.022
12/682 vaccinated = 0.018

subtracting we get an absolute risk reduction (ARR) of .004. this would not be statistically significant enough to show efficacy, but we can use it for comparison, because there were enough incidents for the population results to be significant.

We will now calculate Number Needed to Treat using the formula: NNT = 1/ARR

This gives us NNT = 250. meaning we need to vaccinate 250 patients with prior infection in order to prevent 1 infection via vaccination.

Meanwhile, the reactogenicity study found a Number Needed to Harm (NNH) of around 11 for moderate to severe reactions to the COVID vaccine. The data for that study is not presented as precisely, but this is what i was able to put together from the graphs, and it matches what other's analysis came up with.

Note that the reactogenicity study found a significantly increased risk of adverse reaction to the COVID mRNA vaccines in those with prior infection as compared to those without. I did not factor this in to my NNH. if i had, it would make the results even more extreme.

This looks simple and clean until I try to follow it carefully, find the data he refers to, etc.

When I look for numbers like 716 and 682 in the paper using control+F, I can't find those numbers. I searched for those numbers in this thread, too, and couldn't find them. So back then, I just couldn't figure out where these numbers were taken from.

Normally, vaccine effectiveness is measured by Relative Risk Reduction (RRR), not Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR), so his results aren't comparable to the measures normally reported.

He computed a NNH from a completely different dataset and compared it to the NNT in this one, which isn't valid. And I don't know where the numbers came from in that dataset either. Beyond that, if "harm" means a headache that soon goes away and you weigh that against getting Covid ... it's probably not great to treat all side effects, including minor ones, as though they were on the same level as the disease they are trying to treat.

This discussion comes from a different study, no URL to that study. It seems to be this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8002738/

Here's the part he quotes:

Consistently, compared to the first dose of the vaccine, we found an increased incidence and severity of self-reported side effects after the second dose, when recipients had been previously exposed to viral antigen. In view of the rapidly accumulating data demonstrating that COVID-19 survivors generally have adequate natural immunity for at least 6 months, it may be appropriate to re-evaluate the recommendation for immediate vaccination of this group.

Here's the part he doesn't quote:

In conclusion, this extensive survey of over 2000 recipients of COVID-19 vaccines confirmed the findings of recent randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that COVID-19 vaccines are generally safe with limited severe side effects.

It goes on:

It also demonstrated that mRNA vaccines caused milder, less frequent systemic side effects but more local reactions. These findings will need to be validated in clinical studies, preferably randomized controlled trials including patients from multiple groups.

Now, 15 months later, a lot of that newer research has been done ...

[Bootstrap]

One last comment ... It's quite possible that Nett could straighten out my thinking on some of the things in that last post. I may have made simple mistakes or missed something obvious.

In a research environment, there's a cooperative and engaging game of discovery, where we ask each other questions like that, point out the obvious (oops!) or more subtle areas, and leverage each others' expertise to come up with a better understanding together. That's also what happens in the scientific literature as researchers refer to each other's papers and present their own analysis or results.

I respect that process. It's a lot like the better Bible study threads here, where people pay close attention to the text, ask questions, respond to the things others have said about the text, and gain insight.

I wrote the last post to finish up loose ends, because a few people had asked me to. But ideally, that would be one post in a process where we keep talking things through. It's sad that Nett and I never really got to that point.