I really hope Biden recognizes natural immunity tomorrow in his Covid announcements. Israeli study found it is 27x more effective than vaccines in preventing symptomatic infections. reuters.com/world/us/biden…
Public health officials seem afraid to acknowledge natural imm because they fear it will lead some to choose getting the infection over getting vax.
But we can encourage non-immune Americans to get vaccinated AND be honest & transparent with the data on nat imm at the same time.
Different from Europe, U.S. public health officials cont to dismiss nat imm, losing cred (& hurting vax efforts), insisting those who recovered from Covid MUST still get the vax. They are inexplicably sticking to their original theory that nat imm is fleeting, despite new data.
If I were advising Biden, I would tell him that people appreciate honesty & can be very forgiving.
His medical advisors are like-minded & their group-think got nat imm wrong. It's ok to have a wrong hypothesis in science, but now it's time to accept nat imm for vax requirements.
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The 'natural immunity is unreliable' theory has done a lot of damage. It's OK to have a wrong hypothesis but public health leaders have pushed their theory way too long after data became overwhelmingly clear,yet remarkably clinging to their outdated theory c-span.org/video/?512225-…
The natural immunity is unreliable hypothesis was the opposite hypothesis many of us had last year given the observational data of doctors & nurses consistently saying "We are rarely seeing re-infections and when they occur they are not severe" Clinical wisdom that was dismissed.
Getting this wrong has resulted in tremendous avoidable harm: 1. Thousands of seniors died waiting for a vax when we were vaxing ppl w/ nat imm 2. Bad guidance to the world 3. Heart complications from vaxing kids w/ nat imm 4. Kids kicked out of sch 5. Distracting from vax effort
U.S. cases dropping like a rock! ⬇️42% in 11 days (wkday numb-not wkend reporting bias). Yet govt doctors cont negativity, issuing stern warnings, pushing bad policy & dangling variant fears. ZERO of the hundreds of variants to date worldw have evaded vax ability to prevent death
If I didn’t know better I would have thought I was listening to a congressional hearing last Spring. We need to turn our attention to the parts of the world that need help right now.
In the mildest U.S. flu season of the last 8yrs we had 447K daily new cases in the middle week of that season. We are now at 34K daily covid cases. In the past comparisons to flu were misleading but now covid’s pop fatality rate has decreased to flu levels.
We are still vaccine supply constrained & some regions of the country are still at war with Covid. If supply>>demand then the FDA actions would of had less impact.
Ironically, a (pre-scheduled) NYT headline calling for vaccine mandates was published on the day of the J&J news.
The FDA & CDC are now taking their good old time again, as they did with the pandemic warning, masks, vax allocation guidance, schools, and privileges for vaccinated people.
They convened their experts 2 days after they decided to halt J&J's vax, then punted another 7-10days.