More Vaccination -- More Reinfection

Comparing UK against South Africa

Since most of the readers of my substack already had Covid, a burning question that all of us have is “Will I get Reinfected?” This long article attempts to answer that.

I am exploring this question because the answer seems to be: it depends on whether you were vaccinated. It turns out that the vaccinated seem to be at a much greater risk of reinfection, although the vaccine-free also get reinfected.

Here’s some some tweets to make this more personal:

(Jason means December a year ago before his reinfection that also happened in December)

I will use these four sources:

• UK Weekly national Influenza and COVID-19 surveillance report Week 3 report

• Increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection associated with emergence of the Omicron variant in South Africa

• “Preprint Study Warning of Impaired Adaptive Immunity” — courtesy of our reader Claus L

• UK Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report — Week 3

Reinfections vs Vaccination Rate

Despite being obviously an important question — are there more reinfections in the vaccinated — there are no studies that I know that address this question directly. Why is there no data on this? Well, the lack of this information — is actually information in itself and it makes it highly likely that the funders of “science” have something to hide and do not fund such studies. But let’s try to get actual data instead of dwelling on suspicions.

Since I know two countries that reported reinfections on a similar basis, we can compare their reinfection rates with their vaccination rates.

The countries are the UK and South Africa. What we will see is that

• Temporal pattern of reinfections in the UK is associated with vaccination campaigns (by age) and boosters

• Vaccination unsets existing natural immunity

• A much more highly vaccinated UK has much greater increase in reinfections, despite more immunocompromised people in SA

Look at a helpful chart of UK reinfections from the Flu and Covid report. I annotated it to highlight when the first vax dose was given to older people, as well as younger people.

You can see that in 2020, before the Covid Vax, reinfections among young people (under 30) and older people (above 30) were about at the same relatively low rates. As soon as Covid Vax started to be given to older people (left highlighted area), reinfections among OLDER people (per 1,000 new infections) suddenly exceeded reinfections among young people.

In weeks 22-32, when younger cohorts were vaccinated, the picture REVERSED and now the YOUNGER people became getting preferentially reinfected — now that the young got their first Covid vaccine shots.

Note that the vertical bars of reinfections per 1,000 new infections are NOT supposed to be tracking first infection chart lines: the reinfections are reported divided by first infections and represent the SHARE of reinfections in all infections.

Note that the temporal association is with the FIRST shot of the vaccine. As soon as the first shot is given, reinfection chances go UP.

Here’s the first shot by age chart so you can compare for yourself:

This disturbing epidemiological finding — that reinfections greatly increase with “first shots” — points us to the possibility that the vaccine unsets existing natural immunity.

This is not exactly a new finding. But it is nicely confirmed by the UK data.

Vaccine destroying AND preventing natural COVID immunity

URGENT: Covid vaccines will keep you from acquiring full immunity EVEN IF YOU ARE INFECTED AND RECOVER

There is some theoretical basis for this, which I consider to be speculative technically, but founded on real concerns.

Omicron, Vaccines and Reinfections

Now let’s compare what happened in the UK, with South Africa. In South Africa, to the surprise of researchers, hazard of reinfections during the Beta and Delta waves was lower than in the original first wave. At that time, South Africa was not vaccinated to any large extent, so it seems that natural immunity worked very well in South Africa during Beta and Delta waves.

The hazard ratios for Beta and Delta waves were 0.71 and 0.75 compared to the first wave.

This means that during Beta and Delta, the proportion of reinfected people was even lower than during the first wave. This all changed with some degree of vaccination in SA and immune evasion of Omicron. So the hazard ratio now increased to 2.39. This means that in South Africa, Omicron brought about approximately 2.39/0.71 = 3.36 times increased hazard of reinfection compared to Delta.

Now look again at the same UK picture, repeated here one more time:

We can see that unlike in SA, in the UK reinfection per 1,000 infected increased by FIFTEEN TIMES: from about 1 per 1,000 in Week 48, to about 14-16 per 1,000 during week 52.

So we have:

• Low vaxed South Africa: 3.36 times increase in reinfection hazard

• Highly vaxed UK: 15 times increase in reinfection hazard. So the UK is doing 5 times worse that South Africa.

• The explanation for this likely involves immune damage from the boosting campaign, as well as generally higher vaccination rate.

If this is not a condemnation of vaccination, I am not sure what is.

Note that the new story of February will be the BA2 variant, which seems to be reinfecting the recently recovered vaccinated people. I wrote about it yesterday.

BA2 Omicron Variant is Worth Discussing

Implication for “Natural Immunity”

If it is true that the vaccinated do not acquire true “natural immunity”, then this is obviously bad news for the vaccinated.

However, this is also going to make natural immunity look bad in reinfection statistics, when vaccinated people with ruined immune systems, are aggregated with vaccine-free people, for whom natural immunity works well. Averaged together, our reinfection rate would look lousy and the authorities will tell us “look, your natural immunity does not work — get the vax”.

The answer is “it does work in the vaccine-free”. And “No thanks”.