UK Week 42-45: do the vaxxed acquire "natural immunity"?

Make vaccines great again, by changing definitions

This is my update on UK’s UKHSA vaccine surveillance report. In the previous post, I spent a while explaining how I report on UK’s vaccine effectiveness numbers. Please refer to that post for details if you are new to this series.

After we dispense with the latest (in)-effectiveness numbers, I wanted to touch upon the topic that has the most significance in the long run: will the fully vaccinated Brits be able to acquire natural immunity to Covid, or will they get sick repeatedly?

Case Rates

UKHSA released its latest report for weeks 42-45.

Vaccinated adult Brits comprised 82.84% of all Covid cases among adults.

81.21% of Covid deaths occurred in fully vaccinated Brits.

Because this sounds, and is, so bad, the UK government decided to stop calling fully vaccinated Brits fully vaccinated, and will change the definition of fully vaccinated to include only recently fully vaccinated, or recent booster dose recipients.

We do not know yet how this will reflect in the UKHSA statistics, however it will definitely “MAKE VACCINES GREAT AGAIN”, on paper that is. Suddenly, the previously exemplary double jabbed citizens, will again join ranks with the ignorant, science-denying antivaxxers just because their shots were done too long ago.

As a result, their unfortunate deaths, instead of being a negative for vaccination, now will again show how the “vaccines save lives” because these deaths are now in “not fully vaccinated”. That’s even though the double jabbed will continue dying just as before the definition changed.

That said, not everything is terrible. The unique “negative protection” from illness, remained negative for most groups, but improved for oldest categories due to booster campaign. The oldest 80+ people, and most vulnerable, actually bounced back into positive protection.

The death rates show that effectiveness of “vaccination” at preventing deaths has actually improved. This improvement is mostly due to the booster campaign among 50 and over. Now the “vaccinated” include both “vaccinated long ago” and “boostered”. The latter, due to recently applied booster, are definitely more protected from death.

The black values for week 42-45, represent actual improvement in vaccine death protection. You can see that for category not yet eligible for boosters 40-49, death protection continues declining, but for older people who started getting boosters, death rates are improving. The 18-29 and 30-39 categories, fortunately, experience so few deaths, that week-to-week swings are wild. They were vaccinated much more recently and thus they enjoy much greater death protection.

Not dying from Covid is a good thing, but as I mentioned in my recent article, boosters may actually last only half the time of the original double shot. I jokingly said that if frequency of boosters doubles with every shot, we will eventually arrive at infinite frequency of boosters occurring in a finite amount of time.

Will the double vaxxed get Covid again?

As we know from numerous studies, for the unvaccinated people, having had a symptomatic Covid infection provides ironclad immune protection.

The question that many raise is, will the vaccinated “breakthrough Covid” survivors enjoy the same ironclad natural immunity protection, or will they get Covid again and again? We would obviously like them to be also protected, but will they be?

The answer to this question is not known. Only time will tell us. It is possible that they will get Covid repeatedly.

You can take a look at the same UKHSA report, and turn your attention to page 29:

Seropositivity estimates for N antibody will underestimate the proportion of the population previously infected due to (i) blood donors are potentially less likely to be exposed to natural infection than age matched individuals in the general population (ii) waning of the N antibody response over time and (iii) recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination.

What are these N antibodies and why am I talking about them? What’s so important?

The Covid coronavirus presents numerous “epitopes” to our immune system. Those are similar to body parts in people, those are things that the virus presents to our body just as we “present” our eyes, mouths and nose.

After defeating the infection, our immune system learns to recognize these “epitopes” and reacts if the pathogen is reintroduced, fighting it off easier than the first time. Skipping some details, our immunity learns to recognize the “spikes” (S-protein), the “nucleocapsid” (N-Protein) and other pieces of the virus, and develops antibodies and immune memory reacting to all of those.

This multifaceted memory also provides great protection against “variants”, which would only change something in one epitope.

In contrast, vaccination with any existing Covid vaccine, floods our cells with only S-protein (the “spike protein”). As an aside, this spike protein is extremely toxic, it causes numerous side effects that we read about. Its effects depend on many things such as how exactly you were jabbed and how much of the vaccine entered the blood stream. S-protein can also penetrate cell nuclei and interfere with DNA repair.

That aside, the point of “Covid vaccine” is that our immunity learns to recognize this S-protein and develops antibodies. This allows the vaccinated to fight off covid infection in the first few months post-vaccination. Then these antibodies decline, immunity wanes, and we end up with the UK style situation.

What is important is that vaccine immunity ONLY creates antibodies for S-protein, but not for other proteins of the real virus, like the N-protein. This is what the Roche N test is about: it detects presence of N-antibodies, which can only appear in survivors of actual Covid19.

Thus, unvaccinated survivors of Covid19 develop a variety of antibodies, including S-antibodies (like the vaxxed), N-antibodies (never seen in vaxxed who did not have covid), etc.

The problem is that UKHSA reports, see above, show that vaccinated survivors of breakthrough Covid do NOT develop these N antibodies as well as unvaccinated. Thus, they are denied benefits of full natural immunity. It is possible, though not certain, that this might only leave them with a temporarily increased amount of S-antibodies like from a booster shot, and those wane over time.

This phenomenon of vaccines interfering with natural immunity is NOT new and is called “original antigenic sin” (OAS). Much has been written about it on various forums but you can check our this article. So, it may be that a vaccinated person, upon encountering a breakthrough infection, will only acquire temporary immunity, similar to getting booster shots that wane over time. This is much less desirable and will mean that for the vaccinated, Covid pandemic will never end and so called “herd immunity” is totally impossible.

That vaccinated will be repeatedly reinfected, also provides additional dangers of the virus mutating further and developing more dangerous strains. I hope that the vaccinated will only get one breakthrough infection per person, but it can easily turn into repeated bouts of covid happening twice a year. That would not be a good thing.