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Natural infection vs vaccination: Which gives more protection?
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: Does it make sense to vaccinate those who have had COVID?
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: Is COVID a danger to children? (risk analysis of infection vs vaccination)
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
On the question of vaccination or not, it’s a mistake to consider only the outcome of death..
The risks of infection are twofold: immediate harms including death, and the risk of debilitating long-haul COVID—no fun, as I can attest.
Barring unknown latent side effects of vaccination (no one can rule that out), vaccination appear to be far lower risk than infection itself for high risk people and it does appear to protect most people extremely well against infection. So it’s a reasonable strategy for high-risk people to get vaccinated.
But for low-risk people (particularly children), the science has not yet been done to ascertain whether infection might be preferred for longer and better immunity. And it’s unethical to be vaccinating children at all.
The risks of vaccination are along similar lines: immediate harms for which very low incidence is claimed, and as yet unknown future side effects of unknown seriousness. But given that the FDA has disavowed tracking of side effects and the VAERS system sees only a tiny fraction of the issues reported it is hard to have confidence in safety claims, what with the overwhelming financial and political tidal forces backing vaccination.
Natural infection vs vaccination: Which gives more protection?
13 July 2021. Emphasis added.
Nearly 40% of new COVID patients were vaccinated - compared to just 1% who had been infected previously.
Coronavirus patients who recovered from the virus were far less likely to become infected during the latest wave of the pandemic than people who were vaccinated against COVID, according to numbers presented to the Israeli Health Ministry.
More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously – that is, less than 1% of the new cases.
With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with COVID. By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.
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WIND: the finding is interesting, but it compares the wrong things. It’s risky to take such statistics and come to unwarranted conclusions.
First, it ought to compare negative outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people, in particular the severity of the infections. The vaccine cannot be expected to eliminate infections. So the key question is whether the vaccine reduces severity when someone gets infected plus vaccine side effects, versus severity for an unvaccinated question.
Second, it ignores critical context: what types of people get infected? Those most at risk are likely to have the weakest immune systems and thus to mount a degraded immune system response to vaccination. Should it be a surprise that such people can still be infected? The key question is the effect of vaccination on severity. Furthermore, many high-risk people that were previously infected have died, thus removing them from the pool of potential future infections. In other words, a comparison between vaccinated high-risk people and people that survived infection (the strongest survivors). Hardly an objective comparison.
Third, the percentage quoted above is an overwhelming win for the vaccine—about 1/20 of 1% 'failure rate' is better than just anything else modern medicine has to offer.
It makes sense that natural immunity should be superior. But at what cost from being infected, including long-haul COVID that many people suffer? Perhaps for young low-risk people, it’s much superior, granting lifelong immunity (does it?). And perhaps for at-risk and older people, the vaccination and its side effects will prove to be a far superior course. No one knows these answers yet, because we need 2-3 years to pass to really see what damages the vaccine might have wrought, versus infection, across age groups and other cohorts.
No vaccination has ever been perfect. And vaccines are often ineffective and/or partially effective in the elderly or weak. That’s not an argument against vaccination. The only proper argument is benefits vs risks.
It should be interesting to see how this finding plays out in other countries. And how their respective propaganda orifices deal with it if the same inconvenient statistics pop up. But don’t expect the Big Tech oligarchy to allow it to be discussed, or our leaders to be forthcoming.
