⚠️BREAKING—REINFECTION & NATURAL IMMUNITY—new CDC study in hospitalized adults finds: unvaccinated people with prior #COVID19 infection recently were **5 times more likely** to be reinfected / get breakthrough versus people recently fully vaccinated! 🧵 cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…
2) Here’s the background—
Previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 vaccination can provide immunity and protection against subsequent SARS-CoV-2 infection and illness. ➡️ but the big debate has been which immunity is stronger? Offers more protection? That’s the study aim.
3) “Among COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults aged ≥18 years whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, odds of laboratory-confirmed #COVID19 among unvaccinated adults with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection were 5.49-fold higher”…
4) …”than among fully vaccinated recipients of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine who had no previous documented infection (95% confidence interval = 2.75–10.99).” Wow 👀
📌 Notably this was a clean comparison of fully vaccinated with no prior infection vs those with prior infection!
5) What are the implications for public health practice?
📍All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2. ⚠️
6) Let’s dive into #DeltVariant and reinfection from natural immunity vs breakthroughs by vaccination— reinfection via natural infection is 7.55x higher than breakthroughs!!!
7) What about vaccine type? Reinfection risk is 5x higher with natural immunity vs Pfizer vaccine. But reinfection risk is 7.3x higher with natural immunity vs Moderna! Moderna is again stronger protection and natural immunity much much weaker. 👀
8) Among elderly, natural immunity is almost 20x weaker against reinfection than vaccines!! ⚠️ But even among 18-64, natural immunity is still 2.57x weaker protection than vaccines!! ⚠️
9) Someone warned about this exact issue over a month ago…. Some naysayers had dismissed it because it was not peer reviewed or from CDC. But it was clear vaccine immunity had less breakthroughs than natural immunity had reinfections.
10) to be clear—even if natural immunity had equal reinfection risk as vaccine had breakthroughs—vaccines would still be better. Because it is much much safer. And don’t forget the selection bias in natural infection—that “dead men tell no tales” where you only measure survivors.
11) Thus, natural immunity should be called “NATURAL INFECTION SURVIVORS” who survived an earlier infection. That’s why when even if “natural immunity” people higher antibodies—you’re selecting people who didn’t succumb last time. ➡️And also don’t forget #LongCovid debilitation.
12) But folks who tout natural infection focus on those who *survived*, and they know they had COVID often by looking at just those with enough antibody response in antibody tests! Many survivors **who don’t mount antibodies are often excluded** from studies! Hence it’s biased!
13) Wow- 1 in 4 infected with COVID do NOT develop antibodies! There goes natural immunity strategy — it’s not reliable! Hence get #vaccinated!
14) We should not be talk about natural or artificial immunity at all. Vaccines stimulate your own natural immunity to fight #SARSCoV2 and other viruses. That’s how they work. What “natural immunity” folks really want to say is “let’s mass infect everyone” for expediency. 👀
⚠️CDC WARNING FOR ALL VETERINARIANS, POULTRY, DAIRY & CATTLE FARMWORKERS, SLAUGHTERHOUSE WORKERS—New CDC guidelines now released to use PPE for high risk bird flu exposure occupations (all recommended):
📌N95 respirators
📌Goggles 🥽 or face shield 🛡️
📌Coveralls or fluid-resistant aprons
📌Head covering
📌Rubber boots with sealed seams
📌Gloves
Furthermore:
📍Designated areas for changing PPEs
📍Do not eat, drink, chew gum, chew tobacco, smoke, vape, or use the bathroom while wearing above PPE
📍Shower after work shift
📍(see full list for more details).
Glad the @CDCgov is taking this seriously. You should too. And please don’t drink raw milk 🥛! #AvianFlu #BirdFlu #H5N1 cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/h…
Don’t do raw milk 🥛 please, for the love of god. I know there are many raw milk enthusiasts out there. But just take a pause until this is over? Don’t try to be a macho man about this.
Seriously. Raw milk drinkers… don’t do it. We scientists are pretty damn sure there will be some degree of active virus inside raw milk. Cats have been infected on farms—via likely raw milk. And all 6 cats with bird flu have died of rapid neurological declines, says CDC.
⚠️Bad signal—CDC confirming—“cats having neurologic symptoms, rapid decline, and death” from H5N1 #birdflu. 3 more cases in cats 🐈 on dairy farms… now 6 total. ➡️The prior 3 bird flu positive cats? All dead now. Likely more. This is mammalian adaptation. bnonews.com/index.php/2024…
2) I suspect cats are drinking milk from the dairy cows on the dairy farms. This is why we shouldn’t drink raw milk 🥛 currently. Even pasteurized milk, some scientists are unsure of because of lack of safety data. See thread 🧵 below.
3) Not just cats — certain dog breeds (like beagles are highly susceptible to H5N1 avian flu too. And such dogs can facilitate their adaptation towards humans eventually (since more dogs are around people than dairy cows).
📍Let this sink in—a world leading virologist @RickABright who has studied H5N1 bird flu says he is pausing all his milk consumption until he sees proof from both FDA & USDA that pasteurized milk is safe to drink. Pausing milk because of his concern over lack of transparent data.
Why are scientists pausing milk intake? Because there still isn’t enough data on safety of pasteurized milk. There has been data on other viruses in the past that survive pasteurization. See detailed thread 🧵 below.
Testing conducted by the FDA on pasteurized commercially purchased milk has found genetic evidence of the H5N1 bird flu virus. ➡️But the testing, done by PCR cannot distinguish between live virus or fragments of viruses that could have been killed by the pasteurization process.
The FDA said it has been trying to see if it could grow virus from milk found to contain evidence of H5N1, which is the gold standard test to see if there is viable virus in a product. 📌The FDA *does NOT explicitly say FDA laboratories were unable to find live virus in the milk samples, but nevertheless it does state that its belief that commercial, pasteurized milk is safe to consume has not been altered by these findings.
(Sound familiar? Just like blanket assuming a virus “isn’t airborne”, “cannot transmit without symptoms”, “no human to human transmission” errors during COVID). That said, I will am hopeful that no live virus will be found in confirmation. But let’s be precautious. statnews.com/2024/04/23/h5n…
2) PPE and safety googles or face shield recommended for dairy farmers and anyone handling raw milk 🥛. Also they warn about poor fitting respirators for children (who may work near dairy— like I used to help on a dairy farm as a kid in rural Pa).
3) people working with cattle 🐄 should also “avoid eating drinking smoking chewing gum in contaminated areas or touching eyes.” And people exposed should wear PPE should be monitored for symptoms for 10 days.
📈Measles epidemic trajectory is worsening in the U.S.—it has NOT flattened as some claimed. The surge continues—comparison of newest versus recent outbreak graph. Majority are unvaccinated, but there’s enough unvaccinated in many clusters for outbreaks. cnn.com/health/measles…
2) here is another way to visualize the measles epidemic. Another annoying thing is that although 95% not double vaccinated, 5% of the previous 113 cases were vaccinated— which means that there is waning immunity or vaccine breakthrough with sufficiently big outbreak possible.
3) I specifically wanted about this issue that pockets of unvaccinated could still trigger outbreaks, and vaccine breakthroughs possible due to vaccine waning & if surrounded by pockets of low vaccinations. See my warning oped below. 👇