Nearly two years after the pandemic began, we’re at a strange place in this nation. Some people are as concerned about Covid as they ever were, some are done with it and moving on and a lot of people are floating around somewhere in between. Thinking logically, this would be an ideal time for the media to step up and help clarify what’s really happening. Unfortunately, that objective is most definitely not on their agenda.
In fact, this week’s featured article, courtesy of our friends at Newsmax, is perhaps the best and most powerful example I’ve found of how major media outlets are actually making our Covid-19 problems worse, particularly in relation to the Covid vaccines. It’s a short article, but honestly just the headline – CDC Data: Covid Vaccine Gives Stronger Protection Than Natural Immunity – and the story’s first four sentences (each broken out like paragraphs for some strange reason) tell you everything you really need to know. Here’s a screenshot of all four:
Never mind that “paragraph” 3 makes a statement - that people with a prior Covid infection benefit from Covid vaccines - which isn’t substantiated by any of the data in this study (this study’s authors say explicitly that the study only followed people “who had no previous documented [Covid-19] infection”). The big thing we need to be thinking about here is whether the original source documents on which this story is based actually show what the title and those four sentences assert: that the vaccine gives stronger protection against Covid-19 than natural immunity. Luckily, the author embeds two links to her main source documents right away. The first is in the word “said,” at the end of the very first sentence in the story, which takes you to this CDC press release; and the second is in the word “data” in the fourth sentence of the story, which actually takes you to the CDC’s study summary and data charts.
The first link, to the press release, is honestly irrelevant to both readers and journalists alike; we’ve discussed press releases before (see: Press Releases: A major culprit in the propagandizing of news); they are not good sources of unbiased information. Journalists who use them as the basis for their reporting are not actually practicing journalism. Enough said.
The second link, to the raw data, is the one we are after. This is the one we have to read if we want to see whether the study did in fact illustrate that vaccination was more robust than natural immunity. Basically, the data for the study was collected from “187 hospitals across nine states during January-September 2021” and, as the article noted, the data was obtained from 7000 people. A lot of people get bogged down in the “Summary” & “Discussion” sections of reports like these; for my money, I always skip all of that and head straight for the actual numbers - the raw data in Table #1, which is included after the “References” section. This study followed people who were sick enough to end up in the hospital, with “Covid-like” illnesses, over a nine-month time period, from January to September. Within that group, they were specifically comparing vaccinated people who’d never tested Covid positive before to unvaccinated people who had already had Covid (*moving forward / for the purposes of this article only, I’ll call the former group “vaccinated” and the latter group “unvaccinated”). I can’t fit the whole table in a screenshot, so here’s one of just the top of the table:
What’s amazing to me is, right off the bat, with hardly any digging at all, the data tells a very different story than the headlines of the Newsmax piece or the CDC press release. See those numbers in the very first line of Table 1? The ones that show that 1,020 unvaccinated people ended up hospitalized with “Covid-like” illnesses during the data-gathering time period, while 6,328 fully vaccinated people ended up hospitalized? Unless I’m reading something wrong, these numbers alone seem to illustrate that, over the course of this particular study, vaccinated people ended up six times more likely to be hospitalized with “Covid-like” illnesses than unvaccinated people who’d already had Covid. Suffice to say, that data does not seem to match the Newsmax headline which asserts that vaccine immunity is stronger than natural immunity.
I wish I could say that the confusion stops there, but unfortunately, it gets worse.
Let’s check out the second section, “SARS-CoV-2 test result associated with COVID-19–like illness hospitalization,” where the chart shows whether any of these people actually had Covid. Turns out, very similar percentages of vaccinated and unvaccinated people in this study came away with both positive and negative tests (9% and 5% of unvaccinated and vaccinated people, respectively, ended up testing positive for Covid, while 91 and 95 percent of unvaccinated and vaccinated people, respectively, tested negative). Once again, I’m not really sure what data Newsmax & the CDC used to conclude that vaccination is more durable than natural immunity, but it wasn’t the data in this particular report.
Now skip down to the “Month of index test date” section and look at the overall trends; here’s a screenshot:
In January-March, none of the people in this study had been vaccinated yet, so – naturally – everyone hospitalized with “Covid-like symptoms” in that time period was unvaccinated. What’s fascinating to note, though, is that the unvaccinated / natural immunity group’s cases peaked in May at 294 cases (29% of all unvaccinated people) and then steadily declined from there to 184 (18%) in June, 99 (10%) in July, 31 (3%) in August and 1 (0%) in September.
Over on the vaccinated side, though, the data shows a series of massive jumps, from 6 “Covid-like” hospitalizations in April (0% of all vaccinated people) to 235 such hospitalizations in May (4%) … to 1,300 (21%) in June… and to 2,731 hospitalizations (43%) in July. In August the vaccinated people’s hospitalizations finally began declining to 2,049 (32%), and in September they almost totally dropped off, to 7 (0%). But the major takeaway here in my mind is this: the vaccinated group’s peak, at 43%, was 14 points higher than the unvaccinated group’s peak, at 29%. Once again, this data not only doesn’t support the Newsmax and CDC assertions about vaccine immunity vs. natural immunity… it fully contradicts them.
Two other fascinating observations a normal journalist would make about this chart if s/he was actually trying to tell a complex and true story:
The unvaccinated hospitalizations began declining in June just as the vaccinated hospitalizations started to climb.
Hospitalizations of both vaxxed & unvaxxed alike tapered off to almost nothing by September.
*(I’m no epidemiologist, so I can’t tell you what either of those mean; I’m just pointing out things that a diligent journalist might find interesting enough to write about)
I could go on for days about the data in this chart, but there are two more things I want to point out to illustrate just how un-trustworthy this particular study is.
First, look at the “Site” chart – this is the list of hospitals, or “sites” the people conducting this study used to gather data. Here, again, is a screenshot:
Let’s set aside percentages for a moment and take a look at the numbers of people in this study and where they came from. Turns out, the vast majority of data in this study (63% for the unvaccinated hospitalized people and 76% for the vaccinated hospitalized people) came from two places – Kaiser Permanente Northern California and something called the Regenstreif Institute. I won’t pretend to know why these two places were chosen above every other health system in the country, but it’s safe to say this data is not actually representative of the nation as a whole. The unvaxxed group does have a significant number of people from Colorado as well (15%), but what about other states, like Florida, Maine, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, etc.? How is the data from CA and this Regenstreif institute supposed to represent all 330 million Americans?
While we’re on the subject, what exactly IS the Regenstreif Institute anyway? Turns out, it’s not actually a hospital system at all – it’s an Indianapolis-based data analytics / informatics / health care communications company with ties to Indiana University and Purdue University. So… where exactly did the data that they provided for this study – data that makes up the bulk of the hospitalized people, both vaxxed and unvaxxed – come from? Is it from IU and Purdue? Or is it from Regenstreif’s clients? If the latter, which clients? And how and why were they chosen to be in this study?
There’s a ton more to unpack here (even a quick look at the age demographics of the people in the study warrants explanation: why do more young, unvaxxed people end up being hospitalized with “Covid-like illnesses,” while more older - 65 & up - vaxxed people end up being hospitalized with “Covid-like illnesses?” Isn’t the 65 & up crowd most susceptible to severe Covid… and the group we’re trying hardest to protect?).
But the final thing I want to point out today is about who commissioned and/or funded this study. In the very first sentence of the report, just below the summary, we learn that the “CDC used data from the VISION Network to examine hospitalizations in adults with COVID-19–like illness” (so the CDC funded it). It also turns out the VISION Network itself is nothing more than a formal coalition name for the seven hospitals who submitted their data for the study.
As I’ve said in this blog before, I’m a skeptic when it comes to big media (and today, I’ll add, big government). What I find strangest about this VISION Network business is that it feels like an attempt to obfuscate just who, exactly, is funding the study. I have no idea why they’re hiding this information, mind you, but when a group of organizations (in this case medical), bands together, gives itself a very generic name and hides the details of its involvement deep within the study document, you can bet there is a reason.
Circling back to the Newsmax story, there is one positive aspect to it, which appears in “paragraph” (sentence) #5: “Some have argued against vaccines and mandates, pointing to an Israel study that showed natural immunity gives stronger protection than inoculations.” Unfortunately, the Newsmax author doesn’t go far enough in fleshing this information out for her readers.
For starters, she could have simply included the headline of the Israeli study: “Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine – but vaccination remains vital.” And then there’s the fact that the Israeli study followed 736,509 people (673,676 vaccinated and 62,833 unvaccinated) vs. the CDC’s 7000 people. I could go on, but a much smarter man than I – Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, biostatistician, former Harvard Medical School professor and current Scientific Director at the Brownstone Institute – wrote this excellent comparison of the two studies that’s a tough read for a layperson but both fascinating and damning for the CDC study.
Not only that, but the Newsmax story declines to note that there have been 141 other studies conducted worldwide that come to the very same conclusion that the Israeli one does – that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity; this article includes summaries of and links to every single one. For example, the very first study, which was conducted on 52,238 employees at the Cleveland Clinic, shows that “The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated subjects” and that “Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study. Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination…”
In short, the CDC’s data seems at significant odds with the data of hundreds, if not thousands, of other medical professionals and scientists worldwide. At the very least, this would be reason not to promote the findings of the CDC study as definitive. And yet, the CDC went ahead and made their findings sound definitive anyway. And Newsmax picked up the government’s talking points without verifying them and and ran with it. I’d be willing to bet other outlets did as well.
What’s crazy about this kind of “reporting” is that the raw data that contradicts the headline is very often sitting in plain sight. It’s just that we are so inundated with information these days (as Aldous Huxley predicted we’d be in Brave New World), most times we don’t have time to look.
But time and again I have found, especially when it comes to Covid and vaccines, the media talking points we are fed each and every day often have little basis in fact, and are instead just regurgitations of government press releases, which - as we learned in this case - was itself a flat out lie. The sad truth is, the vast majority of “reporters” today don’t even take the time to read the original source material themselves, and just trust that the government is right. Nothing, as this example clearly shows, can be further from the truth.
The last thing I will leave you with is this: I learned when I wrote that massive piece on Ivermectin that MANY government employees seem to be profiting financially from the pharmaceutical industry. If you read the footnotes at the end of my Ivermectin piece, you’ll see that 30 of 68 people on the NIH Covid-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel receive financial kickbacks from drug companies (and many, if not all, of the companies who make Covid vaccines). Lost in this whole mess, of course, are the rest of us, who are no longer sure if these companies (and our government) have our best interests at heart. The repercussions of this corruption, compounded by our media’s current incompetence, should scare the living daylights out of all of us.
Again, though, I will leave you with the reminder that we still do live in a free country, where information is freely accessible to any and all of us, so long as we take the time to look for it. As we all consider New Year’s resolutions in a few weeks, I’d say a big one to think about would be avoiding believing “news” from any major media outlets and instead seeking out the cold, hard facts for ourselves.
I will be taking the next month off and will start the blog back up again 1/14/2022. Merry Christmas / happy holidays / happy New Year to all!
(*FYI - this article was edited later in the day to clarify in paragraph 5 that unvaccinated, for the purposes of this article, will refer to people who have not been vaccinated against Covid but have already recovered from a prior Covid case)