Now That the Pandemic Is Over, The CDC Admits That Natural Immunity Exists And Protects Against Covid

Oh really? Previous exposure to a virus protects from future infection from that virus?

What strange new science is this?

In August 2021 Science Magazine, a peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, highlighted groundbreaking research out of Israel that upended the public health establishment.

This is from the Foundation for Economic Education. I'm not sure if they're on the level here, or if this is sarcastic.

Of course previous infection protects against future infection.

It was bizarre that the CDC spent so long vigorously denying this, or pretending ignorance of it.

The research, which relied on a database enrolling some 2.5 million Israelis and was led by Tal Patalon, head of the KSM Research and Innovation Center at Maccabi Healthcare Services, and deputy Sivan Gazit, found that previous infection from Covid-19 conferred considerably stronger and longer-lasting protection against the Delta variant than vaccines.

"The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19," Science staff writer Meredith Wadman noted.

Wadman also noted that the research showed that "never-infected people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people" who had previously had Covid.

"It's a textbook example of how natural immunity is really better than vaccination," Charlotte Thålin, a physician and immunology researcher at Danderyd Hospital and the Karolinska Institute, told Science.

These findings should have caused the CDC to change its vaccination "guidance."

But, of course: They did not.

Governments, national, state, and local, continued to coerce people into getting vaccinated, even if they had prior covid exposure (and could prove it).

The "scientific" authorities continued denying that prior infection by a disease provided any defense against future infection, in order to provide the pretext for these blanket mandates.

Only now is the CDC finally acknowledging what was known a year ago.

And which should have been strongly suspected, even absent the Israeli study, because most viruses provide protection against future exposure, once you've been exposed.

Nine months later, the CDC is singing a very different tune.

Upon releasing new pandemic guidelines last week, CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti explained to reporters what many have been saying for more than a year: both vaccines and prior infection offer protection from severe symptomatic Covid.

"Both prior infection and vaccination confer some protection against severe illness," Massetti told reporters. "And so it really makes the most sense to not differentiate with our guidance or our recommendations based on vaccination status at this time."

...

We should be grateful that the CDC's policies have finally caught up to the science, and that state epidemiologists are now recognizing the basic "textbook" science of natural immunity.

However, the change also invites questions, the most important one being, Why did it take so long?

...

There's no easy answer to this question. One hypothesis is that the government created perverse incentives, what critics of the government's approach such as Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya call "the Covid Industrial Complex."

"We've created an interest group to keep the pandemic going," Bhattacharya said in a recent interview with British journalist Lucy Johnston.

This might sound cynical, but economics teaches us to look at politics without romance.

Pfizer has a market cap of $275 billion, and from March 2020 to December 2021 its stock price more than doubled--from $26.04 a share to $59.48. Moderna's growth was even more impressive. Prior to the pandemic, its stock traded at $19. By September 2021 its share price had eclipsed $449, an increase of more than 2,000 percent.

It's not an exaggeration to say that billions of dollars were at stake over whether Covid vaccines were mandatory or voluntary, which might explain why Pfizer alone spent more than $10 million lobbying in 2021 and even more in 2020.

To suggest that something as crude as financial incentives could have played a role (even a small one) in Covid policy might shock people, but it's important to remember that forcing people to buy or use goods (ostensibly for their own benefit) is a tried and true tactic of crony capitalism.

I'd propose another reason, too: Politics and the arrogance of the fake elites.

We all understand that Trump divided the country in all ways. Gentry liberals and Wine Aunts changed their basic tastes to be as Anti-Trump as possible.

And as anti-Trump voter.

While Trump was very, very pro-vaccination, many of his voters were not.

And this created in the Professional Managerial Class -- the most toxic class this country has ever known -- a moral fervor bordering on jihadi fanaticism to not only be as pro-vaccination as possible, but to crush any anti-vaccination resistance, even where there was sound reason, such as natural immunity due to previous exposure, to be skeptical about vaccination's benefits.

A very, very closely related phenomenon -- so close that it's essentially just a part of the first -- is the intense offense the expert class took to being questionedand defied.

When the various "emergency power" declarations were passed, giving these Little Eichmanns the power to do what these nebbishy, weak individuals always dreamed of doing if they had the power to do it -- they seized the opportunity. They did what every Super-Mouse Bureaucrat will always do if you give him or her the power to do it: He or she will abuse that power, he or she will do what she got into government to do in the first place, to make the world better, to make people better, and if people refuse to be made better, then to make them be made better.

The Super-Mice -- the timid weaklings suddenly supercharged with might -- did what weak people do on a power-trip and abused the hell out of their power, and they made the people who defied them and mocked them pay, pay, pay for their insolence.

But, having said that, I would not discount the financial incentive as well.

A lot of people made an awful lot of money on the vaccines.

And as we are all now well aware -- all of official Washington DC knows when to buy early into stocks that are about to take off in value. An awful lot of official Washington DC was financially invested in the proposition that literally everybody, including three month year old babies, needed to be injected with vaccines that the companies they had stock in were being paid for with "free" taxpayer money.

I think it was Russell Brand (I can't believe I'm about to cite Russell Brand) or maybe Jimmy Dore (I can't believe I'm about to cite him, either) who pointed out that, after all American adults had been vaccinated, the priority for vaccination did not turn to, say, vaccinating African adults, but to American children.

Why?

African adults needed the vaccine (assuming it worked). American children did not.

But here's the thing: The government would not pay Pfizer or Merck full price for the vaccine for African vaccinations. Only the discounted price for overseas charity. Probably just a little over cost.

But American children...? Children in wealthy European nations...?

You get paid full freight for those jabs, baby!

So the insane push to to keep vaccinating younger and younger children, who were less and less threatened by covid, was about expanding market share downwards in Western countries that could pay full price for the vaccine.

Not because the kids needed it. But just because the shots got paid at full price.

posted by Ace at 02:45 PM

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