Natural immunity provides better long-term protection, but again herd immunity as a starting point was concerning because of the pressure it puts on the hospital system. That was the way I understood it from the beginning. Herd immunity might end up being the way out eventually but what were they suppose to do? Let more people die in the beginning??? Sorry gramps, you gotta take it on the chin for the team. So you have this very nice gentlemen here explaining the lack of statistics from the CDC, but I'm guessing they don't release it because even though yeah it looks crooked really I'm not sure there was an alternative. I also have to wonder about the "legal" responsibility from our gov't workers that regular civilians do not have to face.
I watched the video you linked. Most of what that guy had to say was straight forward, and I agree with him.
I liked his point that looking only at circulating antibody levels as a measure of immunity is misleading because it ignores the important roles of memory B cells and T cells. So far, there is good scientific evidence that B & T cell immunity are strong after vaccination, and that they last as long as from virus infection. However, those results are from small numbers of people. Because those studies are much more difficult to do on a large scale, we lack very large studies that would confirm this kind of cellular immunity exists on a population-wide basis.
However, I strongly disagree with his conclusions about that Israeli study. He said it shows that the Pfizer vaccine’s immunity wanes, not lasting as long as the immunity acquired by people who were previously infected. That conclusion is invalid because the study's authors ignored risk prediction based on statistical methods. If the Israeli data was done as a properly designed clinical trial, it might suggest that. But it wasn’t a clinical trial at all.
I’ve discussed all this previously in response to some posts from Auditor55. See my posts #6406 and #6421. Also see NINaudio’s post #6418.
Think of it this way. The Israeli study involved about 32,000 people. The raw numbers of people who became infected after previous infection or after vaccination were very small. Was that a fluke? Or, was it a good prediction for an entire population? A statistician would say this differently, asking if the Israeli study was a result of sampling error? If ten more populations were studied, each with another 32,000 people, would those results be repeated? A well-designed clinical trial can answer this question, but the Israeli study only looked at people already in their database. They ignored the question of whether their results could accurately predict risk for a much larger population.
The large clinical trials that were done last year to test the efficacy of the vaccines looked at a large group of people. That group was carefully selected to be as uniform as possible while still reflecting genders, age groups, and prior medical histories. That group was also deliberately made large enough to be reasonably sure that the numbers of people getting infected after vaccination or dummy injection would be large enough to allow meaningful conclusions. Then each member of that group was then randomly given the vaccine or a dummy injection.
The Israeli study looked at everyone in their database, without considering any of the above things I mentioned. When care is made about selecting a large enough patient population for a clinical trial, and that group was randomly given the vaccine or a dummy shot, it allows statistical analysis that can predict risks to a much larger population. The Israeli study ignored that. That study was very large, but was it large enough to accurately predict future risks? No. You must not think of that Israeli study as the same as a clinical trial. And you cannot compare its results to that of a bonafide clinical trial. It's like apples vs. oranges.
