'Past SARS-CoV-2 infection protection against re-infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis'; this LANCET study put out February 2023 should have put SUPERIOR natural immunity question to rest
Along with my seminal paper 2 years now on superiority of natural immunity over vaccine immunity: https://brownstone.org/articles/research-studies-affirm-naturally-acquired-immunity/; but it did not
This potent LANCET published review was sidelined as if it did not exist yet the conclusion was staggering: “Protection from past infection against re-infection from pre-omicron variants was very high and remained high even after 40 weeks. Protection was substantially lower for the omicron BA.1 variant and declined more rapidly over time than protection against previous variants. Protection from severe disease was high for all variants. The immunity conferred by past infection should be weighed alongside protection from vaccination when assessing future disease burden from COVID-19, providing guidance on when individuals should be vaccinated”.
‘identified a total of 65 studies from 19 different countries. Our meta-analyses showed that protection from past infection and any symptomatic disease was high for ancestral, alpha, beta, and delta variants, but was substantially lower for the omicron BA.1 variant. Pooled effectiveness against re-infection by the omicron BA.1 variant was 45·3% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 17·3–76·1) and 44·0% (26·5–65·0) against omicron BA.1 symptomatic disease. Mean pooled effectiveness was greater than 78% against severe disease (hospitalisation and death) for all variants, including omicron BA.1. Protection from re-infection from ancestral, alpha, and delta variants declined over time but remained at 78·6% (49·8–93·6) at 40 weeks. Protection against re-infection by the omicron BA.1 variant declined more rapidly and was estimated at 36·1% (24·4–51·3) at 40 weeks. On the other hand, protection against severe disease remained high for all variants, with 90·2% (69·7–97·5) for ancestral, alpha, and delta variants, and 88·9% (84·7–90·9) for omicron BA.1 at 40 weeks.’
Omicron had sufficient mutations that it presented almost as a novel virus and caused an immune rechallenge. Yet still immune systems have dealt with it effectively.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)02465-5/fulltext#%20
‘results show that high levels of protection—on average greater than 85%—are present for ancestral, alpha, delta, and beta variants across all three outcomes (infection, any symptomatic disease, and severe disease). The analysis shows the substantially reduced level of protection against re-infection or any symptomatic disease to less than 55% for the omicron variant’
I hope I’m protected since I had a horrible case of Covid pneumonia and was hospitalized for 8 days in 2021. Never got any shots.
Relatedly:
Jeffrey Tucker, Founder of Brownstone Institute on Immunity and the Tyranny of the Administrative State
Jerm Warfare Podcast, by Jeremy Nell, https://jermwarfare.com/tnt/jeffrey-tucker-on-being-red-pilled
TRANSCRIPT - BRIEF EXCERPT
[On the Problem of Lost Knowledge and Natural Immunity]
18:03
JEFFREY TUCKER: So early on in this thing, once I saw January 2020, once I saw the data coming out of China, that this wasn't, you know, a virus from Mars, it wasn't a bioweapon that's going to wipe out a third of humanity, or whatever, then I realized that the way out was to live a normal life. You know? And not fear, you know, don't fear the microbial planet. You know? [laughs]
JEREMY NELL: Isn't that what our parents taught us? I mean, when I was little, my folks told me to go play outside, and to get dirty and to play in the mud.
JEFFREY TUCKER: I know what you mean. I think so? I mean certainly that's what I was taught, that's my mother was taught, that's what her mother was taught. There was a great effort in the United States in [?] public health to school people about natural immunity and exposure. Because it's a little counter-intuitive, right? You need to get the germ to avoid immune naiveté, which is ultimately very fatal to you if you stay in a state of immune naiveté
because then the most mild pathogen will kill you. So I knew that. But for some reason that knowledge seemed to be I guess not really present in the general population for some reason.
JEREMY NELL: [laughs]
JEFFREY TUCKER: And you know, my friend Murray Rothbard* used to talk about this strange event that happens periodically in history where a settled proposition of scientific discovery that everybody knew about solves a major problem, and by virtue of that, over several generations, the solution to the problem is forgotten and the problem comes back. So this is what he used to call the problem of lost knowledge. And he would cite often the case of scurvy. That it had to be discovered, the cure for scurvy had to be discovered and then was lost at least three times that are documented in history, once in the ancient world, once in the middle ages, and the once, as soon as, most recently as the post-enlightenment period. Where— and it's a simple problem of vitamin C, which you get by lemons on board a ship. But it would be forgotten, once the problem was solved then several hundred years later, people would come down with bleeding lips, and get sick, and what's wrong with these people, we don't know, we have to— And they kept having to rediscover—
So Murray was obsessed with this problem of lost knowledge because he said it raises, it shows that the sort of what he called the Whig theory of history is wrong. That, you know, we're always getting better, we're always getting smarter, that the latest scientific information always incorporates all the past information, that whatever kind of stuff is coming out this morning, you know, just automatically absorbs by some magical Hegelian process, you know, the whole history of knowledge, the idea that knowledge is cumulative over the whole of human experience, he never believed that.
JEREMY NELL: [inaudible]
JEFFREY TUCKER: Yeah. So he was always looking for cases of this lost knowledge. So I felt like, in 2020, oh! Murray should be around today because he would see that the problem of natural immunity seems to be a case of lost knowledge.
21:33
END OF EXCERPT
# # #
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
* Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). See his biography and a memorial at this link:
https://mises.org/profile/murray-n-rothbard
See also
"Is Immunity a Case of Lost Knowledge?"
by Jeffrey A. Tucker, January 21, 2022
https://brownstone.org/articles/is-natural-immunity-a-case-of-lost-knowledge/