Video: OT’s Michael Siegel and Andrew Donaldson Talk Natural Immunity & COVID-19
Ordinary Times contributors Michael Siegel and Andrew Donaldson discuss natural immunity, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, how “the experts” communicate, & more.
From the Heard Teall YouTube channel:
On this Heard Tell Good Talks, guest Dr. Michael Siegel returns to Heard Tell to cut through the caterwauling about natural immunity and get to facts about how it works, how it doesn’t, and how it should fit into our calculations and policy regarding COVID. Michael also talks about how as a scientist and academic how those fields have lessons to learn from the pandemic, and how they need to communicate better and more effectively to the public.
Their conversation centers around Michael’s piece in Ordinary Times on natural immunity:
COVID denial, like all conspiracy theories, tends to go in cycles. “People are dying with COVID not of COVID” comes up, is debunked, disappears for a few weeks and then resurfaces like a zombie U-boat. “The vaccines are killing people” floats up like one of Pennywise’s balloons, pops, falls back into the sewer and then floats up again. And this week, we are getting the resurfacing of an old anti-vax saw: that “natural” immunity is five, six, seven or 843 times more effective than vaccine immunity.
Natural immunity was six times stronger during the delta wave than vaccination, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, published Jan. 19, analyzed COVID outcome data from New York and California, which make up about one in six of the nation’s total COVID deaths.
The study has limits — namely, it was done before the omicron wave and doesn’t factor in any information about boosters. It does, however, broadly agree with studies from other countries.
Now you may be wondering how, if the vaccines are 80% effective against Delta, “natural” or infection-based immunity is 480% effective. The answer is that it’s not. This is a combination of a counter-intuitive way of stating the numbers combined with a willful misreading of the paper by COVID-skeptic pundits.
One of the standard tricks of the “natural immunity” folks is to use inverted numbers on effectiveness to claim that infection-based immunity appears vastly more effective than vaccine-based immunity. For example, let’s say that only 1 in 5 vaccinated people get sick. But only 1 in 10 previously infected people get sick. In terms of effectiveness, this would mean that the vaccines are 80% effective in preventing infection while prior infection is 90% effective. So, infection has a slight advantage, at least in terms of preventing future cases. But the vaccine skeptics use those numbers to claim infection-based immunity is twice as effective. Because 10 is two times 5.
This is not how this works. This is not how any of this works. This is like saying that someone in my class who got 95% on the exam learned five times as much as someone who got 75%.
Heard Tell is hosted by Ordinary Times managing editor Andrew Donaldson and covers culture and politics, but without all the caterwauling, with new episodes every weekday. Watch on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but what I am getting from this is that natural infection/immunity is more effective than immunization. If so, this is extremely important to know.
You are then burying this important fact with some dust up around how the anti-vaxers are exaggerating the benefit with silly statistics.Report
The difference is small and nothing compared to the risk profile in getting natural immunity vs. getting vaccine immunity.Report
Right, but the side effects of vaccination are pretty unpleasant. I’m not talking about the crazy conspiracy theories, just the well-established side effects. Fever, sore arm, low but elevated risk of mild heart inflammation. If people who have been infected can safely skip a dose of the vaccine, that’s useful to know. It also frees up a dose for someone who needs it more.
Vaccine policy should probably reflect this. I remember hearing about people who had been infected before the vaccine was available arguing that they shouldn’t have to get vaccinated to meet the requirements for school or work. It seems that they had a point.Report
Natural immunity is also only really effective against the same covid strain.
I’d way rather get a modified vax for each new strain than have covid every time. Not only are the side effects of the vaxxed vastly better than that of actually getting covid, but you can’t spread the disease to others.Report
I agree in principle, but there are no modified vaccines. There probably never will be for delta, and the omicron-targeted vaccines look like they won’t be ready until after the omicron wave is over, if ever.Report
Yeah, currently the vaxxes can’t keep up with the mutation rate of the virus. But I’m quite sure that the processes will catch up and we’ll have a seasonal vax just like we have for the usual flu
For that to become reality sooner, we need to drop the covid mutation rate so we don’t get new strains every 3/4 months, but rather every 12 months. Best way to do that is wide scale vaccination. Because although we know that the vaxxed can still spread omicron (and we assume all derivatives to follow) we also know that they do spread it a significantly lower rate.
And we really don’t want the thing to mutate to infect like omicron but kill like delta.Report