On the flip side of yesterdays post: what happened with re-infection among people who HAD been vaccinated?
So yesterdays post discussed how natural infection in the unvaccinated offered protection at a 97% level for not getting a significant, severe, or fatal case of covid if you caught it again. The n-antibodies protected you from severe illness. Today, we discuss what happens in re-infection with covid if you WERE vaccinated. I wish the picture was as pretty as it was for those not vaccinated.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1
This is a study from the Veterans Affairs department. The VA required vaccines, and aggressively so. They threatened their patients and coerced them with pulling their benefits to get them to vaccinate. What they did to their patients is criminal. Lets dig into the results of that study.
There were 257,427 cohort participants with first SARS-CoV-2 infection and 38,926 participants who had SARS-CoV-2 reinfection (two or more infections); 5,396,855 participants with no record of positive SARS-CoV-2 infection were in the control group. Among those with reinfection, 36,417 (12.29%) people had two infections, 2,263 (0.76%) people had three infections, and 246 (.08%) people had four or more infections. The median distribution of time between the first and second infection was 79 days and between the second and third was 65 days. OK so lets stop right here. What is up with those re-infection numbers? Remember yesterdays paper that had a 90% protection for re-infection with delta and alpha? Well, I guess the same was not to be said for the vaccinated. Because Alpha and Delta ran from March 2020-November 2021. So these 60-70 days between re-infections were not protected with natural infection antibodies due to vaccination. Remember……only 46% of people with the vaccine develop n-antibodies when they catch covid. Compared to 92% of the unvaccinated people developing n-antibodies with a covid infection. And in yesterdays study, we saw 70% reinfection protection at the 16 month mark. So, my maths here say that Alpha and Delta ran for 20 months…..for someone who caught alpha in March 2020, they should have been protected at at least a 70% level through July 2021, and at a 50% level through delta. IF they were not vaccinated.
Moving along.
Compared to those with first infection, those with reinfection exhibited increased risk of sequelae in the pulmonary and several extrapulmonary organ systems including cardiovascular disorders, coagulation and hematologic disorders, fatigue, gastrointestinal disorders, kidney disorders, mental health disorders, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders and neurologic disorders. Analyses of prespecified subgroups based on vaccination status prior to the reinfection (no vaccination, 1 shot, or 2 or more shots) showed that reinfection (compared to first infection) was associated with a higher risk of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, at least one sequala, and sequelae in the different organ systems.
Then we see this interesting table. Let’s discuss.
First, in all cause mortality, the unvaccinated did better than the vaccinated did.
Cardiovascular: unvax and 2+ vax were equal. 1 vax did worse.
It would be hard to determine if mental health/GI/fatigue/diabetes were covid related or not. Given the population, those issues were highly likely to be present despite covid.
The biggest caveat here (mentioned below) is were we gathering data prior to January 2021 for this study? If so, the unvaxxed population would be everyone in that time frame. Table 4 states that this study was done from March 2020 - September 2021. So, the majority of this time frame was patients with covid during a time when vaccines were not available. So the “unvaccinated” data is suspect here, as is the 1-2 vaccine data. Because this includes people who, based on when their most recent vaccine was, may get thrown into a category that is not correct. If they used data from 2020 (they did), then EVERYONE is not vaccinated because there was NO VACCINE yet. This is why starting points and endpoints are necessary to look at data. Here is a prime example: someone caught alpha in 2020. They are in the unvaccinated category. They then got a covid vaccine in January 2021. And developed “covid” again (or post vaccine illness labeled as covid more likely) but it was 10 days after their first vaccine. So they would be counted as a “re-infection”, when in reality it was the vaccine causing the illness, BUT they go in the unvaccinated category because it was only 1 shot 10 days ago, and that does not fulfill the time criteria to be considered vaccinated. You cannot compare unvaxxed to vaxxed when 10-11 months of the study there was not a vaccine available, and it was available for 7-8 months of it. How many people developed re-infection because of their vaccine? First infection after the vaccine? You can take everyone who had covid from March-December 2020/January 2021 and throw them in this data as unvaccinated. But they could not have been vaccinated even if they wanted to be. Smells fishy. A more comprehensive believable study would have been to evaluate repeated infection pre vaccine and post vaccine. They show no criteria for a very large variable and that was pre vaccine availability and post vaccine availability. I would lean towards the hypothesis that counting cases prior to covid vaccine artificially bloat the unvaccinated health problems. They really should have just compared the data from January 2021 and on, to show vax versus no vax as a pro or con to ongoing infections and comorbid issues.
I will also note here that we do not know the pre-covid underlying health issues of these patients. It is quite likely they had underlying health problems prior to covid, and their further decline may or may not have been covid infection related. There are too many variables. Therefore, this paper does not provide sufficient evidence to refute the study we looked at yesterday that does provide a percentage range of natural immunity, and the data required to evaluate it as credible. Also, the VA is the government, so anything they report needs a higher level of discernment. There are reasons why they give no data reporting ranges for the unvaccinated in here and lumped them all into the study the way they did. It makes the narrative they want to share fit better.