Comment by sreque | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sreque | Hacker News Reader

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This article completely destroy the CDC's report: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/more-voodoo-e....

The CDC's report is a fantastic example as to why the CDC don't deserve our trust. They are dishonest. They cherry pick data to fit their narrative. They are unburdened by the constraints of peer review. They admit in their own study that it can't apply causation and yet they remain silent as the media run wild and report the study as causative fact.

This analysis has, to my knowledge, not been debunked at all: https://arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israels-delta-outbreak-p....

It shows natural immunity far outclassing vaccine immunity in Israel.

In terms of peer reviewed studies, they all show that natural immunity is fantastic:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781112

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370(21)0...

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209951/pdf/RMV...

https://arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israels-delta-outbreak-p...

> it looks like recovered people — people who had tested positive for the coronavirus in a past PCR test — are massively under-represented. Recovered people are around 9% of Israel’s population, but they’re less than 1% of current cases.

> That has led to speculation that recovery from past Covid is more protective against infection from the Delta Variant than vaccination. Known recovered people in Israel are mostly not vaccinated, though some chose to get a single booster dose ... From data I was passed last week, recovered people were testing at only 0.1% positivity, compared to more than 1% for vaccinated people.

> I wouldn’t be surprised if natural infection turned out to be more protective against variants than spike protein vaccination. It makes sense that the body’s immune system would find more ways to attack the whole pathogen and would recognise different parts of it compared to the changing spike in variants.

https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-... argues that people are misinterpreting the Israeli data due to Simpson's paradox:

  In the case of vaccine efficacy vs. severe disease, it is
  the fact that both vaccination status and risk of severe 
  disease are systematically higher in the older age group 
  that makes overall efficacy numbers if estimated without 
  stratifying by age misleading, producing a paradoxical 
  result that the overall efficacy (67.5%) is much lower 
  than the efficacy for either of the age groups (91.8% and 
  85.2%).

Thanks for sharing this analysis. I scanned through it and it seems reasonable to me. I don't think anyone actually thinks natural immunity is 7 times as effective as vaccine immunity, as the numbers suggest might suggest without deeper or more thorough analysis.

As far as I can tell, the analysis you link also continues to support the notion that natural immunity works wonderfully well, on par with or better than vaccine immunity as far as we can tell.

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