Comparing the protection from the vax to previous infection
A study out of Qatar (behold the power of data presentation!)
The New England Journal of Medicine published this study from a group in Qatar last week.
As always, it is possible to go into way too much detail and make this Substack post just as difficult to parse as the original paper. Instead, I will just show a couple of their figures and include just a little bit of analysis.
In general, I don’t have any major methodological concerns with the study. It looked at the entire country of Qatar, and therefore skews male and younger. The groups (split into ‘experimental’ and ‘matched controls’ are reasonably large (smallest was around 6,000; largest was around 25,000) suggesting a decent amount of statistical power (i.e., the results likely meaningfully reflect the whole population).
They investigated the effectiveness of the two major mRNA vaccines, BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech) or mRNA-1273 (Moderna), as well as natural immunity due to previous infection with variants other than omicron, and hybrid immunity (previous infection and vaccination) against the two major Omicron variants (BA.1 & BA.2)
If all that sounds confusing, don’t worry!
I am only going to look at the basic categories (natural immunity vs Pfizer vax vs Moderna vax) and their ability to protect from a new, symptomatic COVID infection. I will essentially be ignoring their data on hospitalization and death because there is either a) no statistical difference among the groups or, b) the results are skewed by the timing (e.g., recent boostered patients compared to long-ago natural immunity ones). If such data interests you, please look at the original paper.
What did they find?
First, two does of either vaccine made patients MORE likely to become infected with Omicron.
According to this data a previous COVID infection (not Omicron) provided only about 50% protection against a new infection (blue triangle on left of each graph).
However, unboosted recipients (two doses only) of either Pfizer or Moderna ‘vaccines’ had negative efficacy against Omicron (second dot from the left in light green).
Taking the jab made people more likely to catch COVID!!
Also, no additional protection (statistically) was provided by getting vaxxed after a natural infection or from being boosted.
For those in Rio Linda: the vaccines either failed to make any difference in your chance to catch Omicron or made it more likely.
Second, protection provided by the vaccines fades dramatically over time, while there is no drop off in those with natural immunity.
Here is Figure 3 from the paper.
It is (more than) a little confusing…
…because it tries to graph natural immunity, 2-dose, and boosted groups on one chart without overlapping the timelines.
To try and help clarify what is going on here, let me add some lines for each group.
But even this doesn’t really tell the whole story because of the different timelines for the three groups. They have different starting and ending points.
I collated and re-graphed all those lines on the same time scale.
This is what the data REALLY looks like:
What a difference data presentation makes!!!!
Now it is obvious that the vaccines have failed to improve the situation.
By not even starting the ‘natural immunity’ line until ‘4-6 months’ and graphing the lines sequentially (instead of overlapping), the clear differences among the groups is obscured. (Again, I have made no alterations to the numbers or lines, simply aligned them on the same scale.) In my opinion, this is the point of the odd presentation: to obscure the results.
How far after booster do you think negative efficiency will take effect? I’m thinking fall at work could be rough.