Israeli Study: Natural Immunity Is 13x Stronger Than Pfizer Covid Shots

I don't think the OP meant that the paper is suggesting that, the article linked makes it clear that Senators (such as Rand Paul) are using this pre-print paper to suggest exactly that. Rand Paul has a lot of clout and influence over the various narratives in this country, especially against protective mandates. In his world, public policy would be non-existent, and the will of the people would be enacted through market forces (choosing to go to certain businesses based on their personal decisions to impose mandates as a business on their customers or employees). Then the market decides if we actually as a country naturally fight against the virus at all or instead help it spread, and further divide the country based on people's uninformed individual purchasing choices.

The science really doesn't enter the picture for Rand Paul, despite him being a medical doctor, because to him government intervention in anything is always inherently bad.

Recent meta analyses estimate a global average IFR of ~0.15% [1], which is extremely biased by age. All age stratified IFRs show risk that decreases by orders of magnitude with age. We're talking IFRs below 0.003% for healthy young adults and children [2][3].

I'm not advocating against vaccination, just illustrating that the risk-reward profile is different for everyone based on their age and health. If you want to derive useful probabilistic risk estimates, there are many complex factors to consider.

[1] Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1

[2] Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7947934/

[3] COVID-19 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/2/410/6146069

The countries with the lowest CFR consistently report about 0.1% CFR. These countries also have the best surveillance, and this is likely near the actual IFR (incidence fatality rate).

The adjusted difference is closer to a 100x benefit for vaccination than a 1,000x. Both are of course immense improvements over no vaccination, at minimal risk.

This is nowhere near correct. The global median IFR for Covid-19 is somewhere around 0.3%. It varies substantially by region, but 1.8% is far higher than even the highest legitimate estimate.

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/340124

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Most other countries have had lower mortality rates because the average American is older, and has more co-morbid conditions such as obesity.

For vaccinated patients the mortality rate is close to zero.

I'm happy to correct / update my comment with a reputable source.

From US CDC:

Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare. More than 363 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through August 23, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 6,968 reports of death (0.0019%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

As of 23 August 2021.

Note that 6,968 deaths is from all causes, not necessarily COVID-19. It's about 100x below the IFR of COVID-19.

You are spreading disinformation. Vaccinated people who do get sick are less likely to spread the virus, and have a high viral load in their system for a shorter duration:

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A vaccinated person may have the same viral loads as an unvaccinated person, but that high level of virus lasts only three to four days compared with an unvaccinated person who could be contagious for up to 10 days, said Suresh Mittal, professor of virology at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“Individuals who are vaccinated have a good immune response. If they get in contact with people who are infected, they might get infected, but the majority may not transmit,” he said.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/08/11/covid-...

So if you want to travel right now freely you need to be double dosed unless you have recovered recently.

Does delta change that ? Is natural immunity from a previous variant as effective against delta ?

I think you mean rhinoviruses?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

Once immunity is built up to delta, then it'll be forced to evolve to achieve immune escape and that'll make it mutate much more than it has and pick immune escape mutations that will make it "worse" in the immune naive population. Immune escape will come at a cost.

And the scientific evidence of "waning immunity" in the headlines these days is likely wrong and a gigantic lesson in confounding factors. The HCoV-229E common cold coronavirus evolves to escape immunity, and this one probably will as well:

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

So our immune systems will evolve and take the edge off of all future coronavirus infections, but the virus will also have to evolve and be forced to make tradeoffs and will become less virulent in the process.

So if you caught one of the common cold coronaviruses right now and had zero inherited immunity to it, then it would probably still be somewhat mild since it would have been evolving for hundreds of years to be more stealthy than virulent. If you caught the original pandemic version though it would probably suck about as hard as SARS-CoV-2 right now.

As a made up example to illustrate this point, assume that people are either "lucky" or "unlucky". Unlucky people die when they get the virus. Lucky people never die. Assume that one person per million is unlucky, and assume that the vaccine does absolutely nothing. Then this experiment on one million people would find one death in the vaccinated and zero deaths in the control group, inferring that natural immunity is infinitely better.

If 2% of people are 80% likely to die from COVID, and the rest have a baseline 0.1% risk. Assume prior infection provides no protection:

* 1000 (of whom 20 are particularly vulnerable) people are naturally infected; .001 * 990 =~ 1 people of average susceptibility die; 16 maximally susceptible people die. Total of 17 deaths.

* Then, you are left with 983 people, (of whom 4 are particularly vulnerable). Upon reinfection, .001 * 983 =~ 1 person of average susceptibility dies; 3.2 people of high susceptibility die. There's a total of ~4 deaths.

This is a 4x reduction in deaths even if there's no protection from prior infection.

If the pool of people you're studying is people who got it a second time, they cannot have died when they contracted it the first time by definition (i.e you simply cannot die and then continue living and participate in a subsequent study)

That said, you can account for this confounding factor and perhaps the study did account for that (didn't read it). I'm just pointing out that the question cannot be dismissed just by looking at whether death rates are part of the study or not