Posted on 06/04/2021 8:13:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you’re among those of us who aren’t tribally invested in Covid politics but would like good information about when life will resume as normal, chances are you’re interested in herd immunity. You’re likely not interested in having to rely on the Internet Archive for good information on herd immunity. Alas, it’s become a go-to place for retrieving, as it were, previously published information on herd immunity that became inconvenient post-vaccine and then virtually Memory-Holed.
Over the past 15 months, the litany of Experts’ True Facts and Science regarding various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 has changed more often than the starting lineup of a bad minor league ball club. Covid-19 is spread by droplets, especially from asymptomatic people, until one day it was airborne all along and people who weren’t sick in all likelihood weren’t even sick. Stay at home, you’re safer indoors, even stay away from parks and beaches; well, actually, outdoors is the place to be. Masks don’t work against viruses and are actually unhealthy to wear if you’re not sick, then suddenly they did work and without one you might as well be shooting people. Everyone knows and PolitiFact verified that the virus couldn’t have been created in the prominent infectious disease lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats coincidentally at Covid Ground Zero until, one day, PolitiFact had to retract the entire “Pants on Fire!” article. And so forth.
Unfortunately, information about herd immunity has also not been immune to this kind of meddling. Until recent months, people readily understood that active immunity came about either by natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity comes from battling and defeating an actual infection, then having your immune system primed for the rest of your life to fight it off if it ever shows up again. This immunity is achieved at a sometimes very high personal price.
Vaccine-induced immunity is to prime your immune system with a weaker, non-threatening form of the invading infection, so that it’s ready to fight off the real thing should you ever encounter it, and without your having first to risk severe illness or death.
Those interested in herd immunity in itself likely don’t have a moral or political preference for one form of immunity to the exclusion of the other. Immunity is immunity, regardless of whether a particular person has it naturally or by a vaccine. All immunity contributes to herd immunity.
Others, however, are much less circumspect. They seem to have forgotten the ultimate goal of the public campaign for people to receive vaccination against Covid-19. It’s not to be vaccinated; it’s to have immunity. People with natural immunity — i.e., people whose immune systems have faced Covid-19 and won — don’t need a vaccine.
They do, however, need to be considered in any good-faith discussion of herd immunity. There are two prongs to herd immunity, as we used to all know, and those with natural immunity are the prong that’s being ignored. It’s not just mere oversight, however. Fostering such ignorance can lead to several bad outcomes:
People with natural immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal commerce, and who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they don’t need in order to fulfill a head count that confuses a means with the end
The nation could already be at herd immunity while governors and health bureaucrats continue to exert extreme emergency powers, harming people’s liberties and livelihoods
People already terrified of Covid — including especially those who’ve already had it — would continue to live in fear, avoiding human interaction and worrying beyond all reason
People could come to distrust even sound advice from experts about important matters, as they witness and grow to expect how what “the experts” counsel diverges from what they know to be wise counsel while it conforms to and amplifies the temporary needs of the political class
Those of us wanting good information certainly don’t want any of those outcomes. But others seem perfectly fine to risk them. They include not only elected officials, members of the media, political talking heads, self-important bureaucrats, and their wide-eyed acolytes harassing shoppers, but strangely also highly prominent health organizations.
For example, late last year Jeffrey Tucker showed that the World Health Organization (WHO) suddenly, and “for reasons unknown,” changed its definition of “herd immunity.” Using screenshots from a cached version on the Internet Archive, Tucker showed how the WHO altered its definition in such a way as to erase completely the role of natural immunity. Before, the WHO rightly said it “happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” The WHO’s change stated that it happens “if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not long after Tucker’s piece appeared, the WHO restored natural immunity to its definition.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seemingly apropos of nothing, on May 19 issued a “safety communication” to warn that FDA-authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests “should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time.” The FDA’s concern appears to be that taking an antibody test too soon after receiving a vaccination may fail to show vaccine-induced antibodies, but why preclude its use for “identifying people with an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2 from a recent or prior infection?” Especially after stating outright that “Antibody tests can play an important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”
Then there is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance. He had told people that herd immunity would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity, and then he started publicly cinching those numbers up: 75 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent, even 90 percent (as if Covid-19 were as infectious as measles). He is quoted in the New York Times admitting to doing so deliberately to affect people’s behavior:
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.“
Now — or better put, as of this writing — Fauci has taken to arguing herd immunity is a “mystical elusive number,” a distracting “endgame,” and therefore not worth considering. Only vaccinations are worth counting. As he put it recently, “We don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people [it] makes society be more and more protected.”
While composing an article about natural immunity and herd immunity for my home state of North Carolina, I happened to notice that the Mayo Clinic had removed a compelling factoid about natural immunity. It’s something I had quoted in an earlier discussion of the matter and wanted to revisit it.
Here’s what the Mayo Clinic once wanted people to know in its page on “Herd Immunity and COVID-19” with respect to natural immunity: “[T]hose who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) pandemic were later immune to infection with the H1N1 flu, a subtype of influenza A.” The Mayo Clinic pointed out that H1N1 was during the 2009-10 flu season, which would be 92 years later. That finding attested to just how powerful and long-lived natural immunity could be.
As can be seen from the Internet Archive, however, sometime after April 14 the Mayo Clinic removed that compelling historical aside:
The Mayo Clinic also reoriented its page to feature vaccination over “the natural infection method” (method?) and added a section on “the outlook for achieving herd immunity in the U.S.” This new section stated that “it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity” but encouraged people nonetheless that “the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at protecting against severe illness requiring hospitalization and death … allowing people to better be able to live with the virus.”
Why, from people who know better, is there so much interest in downplaying or erasing natural immunity?
Is it because it’s hard to quantify how many people have natural immunity? Is it out of a mix of good intentions and worry, that discussing natural immunity would somehow discourage (“nudge,” in Fauci’s term) people from getting vaccines who otherwise would? Is it simple oversight, being so focused on vaccinations that they just plain forgot about natural immunity? Or is something else at work?
Whatever the reason, it’s keeping Americans in the dark about how many people have active immunity from Covid-19. It’s keeping people needlessly fearful and suspicious of each other. It’s empowering executive overreach. Worst of all, it’s tempting people to consider government and business restrictions on the unvaccinated, regardless of their actual immunity.
Natural immunity is much better than being injected with a poison that will make your body produce deadly spike proteins.
I asked about being able to get an antibody test to show that I had and recovered from the virus back in January of 2020, and therefore do not need to take the jab. The Doctor as well as other local medical people told me that won’t work because the antibodies only last a couple of months. I would like to find definitive research facts to show them that they are wrong.
because America no longer has a free media.
The corruptocrats spent the last 50 years compromising the !st Amendment from within.
Next question please..
About the link you sent. This seems to be a test to detect if you currently have the virus and possibly more accurate than the PCR tests.
I want to know about the reliability of a test to detect whether or not I have antibodies the show I have already had the virus and my natural immunity fought it off.
may wanna ask your doc..to me it looks like it test to see if you have long term immunity tho
There is something in the shots that isn’t good. The desperation for everyone to get one is telling
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Or a means of ‘justifying’an eventual digital ID to track everybody on the planet.
“Sorry, sir. Our scanner shows you have not had your vaccine update. You cannot enter the building. And you shouldn’t be visiting the liquor store so often”.
Really? Someone actually conducted challenge trials to test this? That's incredible! Please link to the challenge trials where people who had SARS2003 were challenged with live SARS-CoV-1 17 years later. I'd love to read about that and how they got around all the ethical problems of performing such a trial.
Or did you mean to say that there is evidence indicating an available immune response of some type to SARS-CoV-1? Because that would be true for literally any pathogen your body has been exposed to ever, through either infection or vaccination.
"Quite simply natural immunity is the best immunity.
Please explain the difference between "natural immunity" and vaccinated immunity starting with the dendritic cells in the lymph nodes. Explain precisely how the process differs once T cell and B cell lymphocytes are forming. How, exactly, are the T cell and B cell lymphocytes different?
"Immunity through vaccination with an attenuated virus vaccine works good as well. The reason being that both allow the immune system to see the WHOLE VIRUS."
You mean the whole virus including the nucleocapsid protein that a 2012 paper warned was a prime target for antibody dependent enhancement (ADE)? The only whole virus vaccines on the market are the Chinese made ones and they show efficacy of around 50%. So good luck with that. 50% efficacy and risk of ADE. Sounds like a winning combination.
"Immunity through spike protein only…..well we are all seeing that it just does not hold a candle to those above. Which makes sense as the immune system only got to learn a very small part of the overall."
The S protein was specifically targeted for vaccine development because it's critical to the virus' lifecycle, is restricted in how much it can change (due to the fact that it still needs to be able to bind properly for cell entry), and shows minimal risk for ADE. The vaccines available in the US show extremely high efficacy, including ~95% for Moderna and Pfizer. 95% is the same efficacy as the smallpox vaccine. That's much better than most vaccines.
"Another problem is no one is talking about our innate immune system. You know, the part of the immune system that can clear a virus like covid without ever needing the second tier defense of antibodies."
You're talking about macrophages, neutrophils, the complement system, etc. Yeah, I know all about that one too. And no, for most people that doesn't do it. They may not have outward symptoms, but studies have shown there's heart and lung scarring for a lot of people with mild or asymptomatic cases as well. What made their symptoms mild? Not known at this time. But the damage can still happen and there's no way to reliably predict who will have a mild or asymptomatic case anyway. Nobody's talking about it because there's no point to talking about it.
"Trust your immune system, it is a wonderfully amazing system, bestowed upon us by none other than God himself."
It certainly is a wonderful, complex, and useful thing. But it's also not perfect. Smallpox, polio, influenza, HIV, ebola, hantavirus, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, rabies, anthrax, bubonic plague, typhoid, diphtheria, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, pertussis, measles, and thousands of other pathogens walk right past our immune system like it's a joke. Before the advent of antibiotics, a simple cut on your finger could turn deadly.
You are holding up the human immune system as the answer to everything while standing on the shoulders of antibiotics and vaccines to do so. Smallpox alone killed over 500 million human beings in its last 100 years of existence before we wiped smallpox off the planet with vaccines. The innate immune system didn't stop it. The head start given to the immune system by vaccines did. Vaccines continue to improve and the new mRNA platform is enabling us to finally stay ahead of pathogens that mutate rapidly. COVID-19 is going away soon, and Influenza after that. In 5-10 years (maybe sooner), we won't have a flu season in western countries.
"In SARS-CoV-2 vaccinees and COVID-19 patients within the first weeks after vaccination or infection, respectively, antibody responses to SARS-CoV S increased. Vaccinees and severely ill patients developed similar concentrations of anti-SARS-CoV S IgG, whereas those of moderately ill patients were significantly lower."
And there's fun pictures to that effect as well:
(Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666634021000350)
I've never said that recovery from infection doesn't provide protection. In fact, I said the opposite. But the literature is clear: vaccination and recovery from severe COVID-19 provide the most protection, while recovery from mild or asymptomatic infection provide less. Certain variants impact this protection. We've seen that already in places like Brazil and South Africa. Reinfection with the same variant appears exceedingly rare. Breakthrough infection following vaccination is also exceedingly rare.
And no, I'm not "pushing the vaccine". I'm passing along factual information. If factual information feels like "pushing the vaccine", that may be because the vaccines have a lot of benefits to them. But if you don't want to get vaccinated, don't. I don't care what choice you make. I care that everyone has the facts in hand to make an informed decision for themselves.
A thread on antibody testing.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3965215/posts
Seems there are different tests and the ones used, indeed, are only accurate in recent cases.
Incorrect. Your post made two claims (without evidence.)
Claim 1: The current numbers in Brazil are all people who had COVID before, and who caught the “new variant.”
Claim 2: People who had mild or asymptomatic infection and recovered aren’t protected against variants and must rush out to get the vaccine.
The links that I provided include scientific data that people who were infected prior do indeed have neutralizing antibodies for new variants.
You completely ignored that in the response.
Instead, you try to shift the focus on the claim that people who had a mild infection have less antibodies than people who had a severe infection, and by implication you want to suggest that you need the higher number to “be protected.”
The problem with that, is that you have absolutely zero evidence for that claim.
In fact, you apparently can’t understand that the antibodies that they are measuring in these studies are focused on the spike protein AND that someone who has natural immunity has broad immunity to more than just the spike protein.
You also just assume, without evidence, that someone with lower antibodies is somehow less protected and the science doesn’t support that at all.
So, I’ll pose a simple question to you. Until you can answer this with a concrete number, I will continue to pose it to you over and over again. So be prepared. You will get no other response from me.
What specific antibody level in U/ml is sufficient to protect against reinfection. Please cite your sources with peer reviewed research.
Now, I’ll leave you with this, I had a very mild case of China flu. It was an absolute joke. (Full disclosure, I did dose with ivermectin horse paste on Day 1 and Day 3.)
Despite people like you who seem to think that its a death sentence for anyone that gets it, it was nothing more than a cold. It was such a joke that 2 days in I was running and working out. Short of having a strange headache for two days and losing my smell for about a week, it was nothing.
I recently had my antibodies tested, I have DOUBLE the antibody level that the average non-infected person gets after getting their first shot of the mRNA vaccine. Double. The data indicates that the antibody levels increase over time before plateauing and then dropping to a slightly lower level, with the understanding that my T cells will create NEW antibodies if I’m ever exposed again.
So why on earth would I go out and get one of the vaccines that you are peddling, when 1. My immune system worked fine. 2. I have antibodies.
False; I never made any such claim. I did make reference to evidence in studies like the one published in the Lancet (https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00183-5/fulltext) regarding Manaus Brazil and the impact of the P.1 variant's emergence there, despite that population already having reached the previously assumed Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT). Infections and hospitalizations spiked tremendously when the P.1 variant emerged.
"Claim 2: People who had mild or asymptomatic infection and recovered aren’t protected against variants and must rush out to get the vaccine."
False; I never made any such claim. I said they have a lower level of protection. I then provided documentation to that effect including a pretty diagram from a referenced published study. Antibody titers are lower for those who have had mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 than they are for those who have had severe COVID-19 or who have been vaccinated.
"What specific antibody level in U/ml is sufficient to protect against reinfection. Please cite your sources with peer reviewed research."
That is a function of level of exposure, individual immune system response, type and quantity of antibodies present, and which variant the individual is exposed to. In other words, it's entirely situational. However, greater levels of antibodies provide greater levels of protection. If you have 2 antibodies in your whole body, they aren't helping you. If you have 500 billion, they're likely overwhelming any variant and any reasonable level of exposure.
"Despite people like you who seem to think that its a death sentence for anyone that gets it"
False claim number 3. I have never said any such thing. The data says that about 40% of people who become infected show no symptoms at all. Another 40% show mild symptoms easily mistaken for a cold or allergies. 5% have a severe enough case to require hospitalization. 3% end up in the ICU. Somewhere between 0.65% and 1% die.
You keep putting words in my mouth and then tearing down claims I never made. That is not an honest, good faith discussion.
"So why on earth would I go out and get one of the vaccines"
I don't care if you do or not. That's your decision to make. Don't want a vaccine? Don't get it. All I care about is people having the information in front of them so they can make their own informed decision. If that decision is not to get vaccinated, then so be it.
What specific antibody level in U/ml is sufficient to protect against reinfection. Please cite your sources with peer reviewed research.
"That is a function of level of exposure, individual immune system response, type and quantity of antibodies present, and which variant the individual is exposed to. In other words, it's entirely situational. However, greater levels of antibodies provide greater levels of protection. If you have 2 antibodies in your whole body, they aren't helping you. If you have 500 billion, they're likely overwhelming any variant and any reasonable level of exposure."
What specific antibody level in U/ml is sufficient to protect against reinfection. Please cite your sources with peer reviewed research.
Well, if you need a study to tell you that 2 antibodies are insufficient and 500 billion are plenty, then okay...
Here you go: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/806
What specific antibody level in U/ml is sufficient to protect against reinfection. Please cite your sources with peer reviewed research.
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