We will divert a bit from our usual newsletter format focusing on a single issue to give you quick summaries and links to several important issues on our radar screen. Here goes:
* Natural immunity endures: To follow up on our newsletter from last week about the strength of natural immunity, Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins and co-authors report in their new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association—JAMA—find that those who are not immunized but who have recovered from Covid have much more enduring immunity than those who have been vaccinated.
Of test subjects who were not vaccinated but who had previously tested positive for Covid-19, 99% still had strong antibodies after 20 months. Strong immunities were found in 55% who believed they had COVID-19 but who were never tested, and in 11% who believed they had never had #COVID19. That compares, of course, to the dramatically waning protection from the vaccines.
“When companies fired those with natural immunity, they fired those least likely to spread the infection,” Makary writes.
* Correction:
Two readers wrote to us with a correction of my summation of the study.
“The fact that antibodies were detected after 20 months DOES NOT mean the previously infected are still adequately protected against COVID,” one scholar wrote.
“The brief article ends: ‘Although evidence of natural immunity in unvaccinated healthy US adults up to 20 months after confirmed COVID-19 infection is encouraging, it is unclear how these antibody levels correlate with protection against future SARS-CoV-2 infections, particularly with emerging variants. The public health implications and long-term understanding of these findings merit further consideration,’” one wrote.
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Another corrected us: “According to the study itself, ‘Among 295 reported COVID-confirmed participants, 293 (99%) tested positive for anti-RBD antibodies … . A median of 8.7 (IQR, 1.9-12.9; range 0-20) months passed since reported COVID-19 diagnosis.’
“…Some Covid-confirmed study participants still had strong antibodies up to 20 months later, but definitely not 99% of them.”
We stand corrected.
Lockdowns don’t work and are enormously harmful: Lockdowns in Europe and the US decreased COVID-19 mortality by a measly 0.2% on average, while the economic costs of lockdowns were enormous.
Johns Hopkins economics professor Dr. Steve Hanke reports in a new study with co-authors that while “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Government authorities failed us: Paul Mango, who has a forthcoming book on Operation Warp Speed that he led, tackles the enormous failures of the CDC in a new article for American Greatness.
“After two years of responding lethargically, failing to reveal key data, and issuing muddled messages, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has proven it is fundamentally incapable of leading the nation through a fast-moving pandemic…Nothing short of a complete transformation is necessary.”
Galen Senior Fellow Doug Badger also has written about the inexcusable failures of the CDC. He collaborated with Joel White on a paper that examined CDC’s flawed data collection system and recommended the establishment of a real-time data collection and dissemination system, as Congress has required since 2006. The CDC has simply ignored Congress’ demands to modernize and not continue to use fax machines to gather data!
Masks: Don’t get us started here. In its all-over-the-map guidance on masks, the CDC now says that cloth masks are virtually useless against Omicron and that we should wear N-95 masks or respirators.
Where does this end? Start by freeing children as young as two years old from this torture!
So just to summarize, many of the things the data now show to be true would have gotten you thrown off social media just a few months ago:
- Natural immunity works and is more durable than the vaccines.
- Lockdowns don’t work and are enormously harmful.
- The masks most of us wear are useless.
- Government guidance and “experts” have failed us, and modernization of agencies is vital.
