Story at-a-glance

>According to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, if you've already recovered from a bout of COVID-19, the immunity mounted by your body may not be enough to prevent reinfection with the Delta variant, so your best bet is to get the COVID shot

>August 6, 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a case control study claiming that unvaccinated people are "more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus"

>One of several drawbacks of this study is that it did not look at illness severity. It doesn't tell us whether more vaccinated people were symptomatic than the unvaccinated, or vice versa

>A far better gauge of how well the COVID jabs are working would be serious infection, hospitalization and death rates, and when we look at those, a different picture emerges

>In Israel — where data suggest those who have received the COVID jab are 6.72 times more likely to get infected than people who have recovered from natural infection — a majority of serious cases and deaths are occurring among those injected with two doses of Pfizer's mRNA jab

According to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, if you've already recovered from a bout of COVID-19, the full-spectrum immunity mounted by your body may not be enough to prevent reinfection with the Delta variant, so your best bet is to get the COVID shot. Mid-August 2021 he told CNN:1

"… what we've understood, actually, from the studies about natural immunity, we are seeing more and more data that tells us that while you get some protection from natural infection, it's not nearly as strong as what you get from the vaccine, especially with the Delta variant, which is the hardiest and most contagious variant we've seen to date. We need all the protection that we can get. That's why the vaccines are so effective."

Data Analysis Claims Unvaccinated More Prone to Reinfection

August 6, 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a case control study2,3 claiming that unvaccinated people are "more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus."

The study used data reported to Kentucky's National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) to assess SARS-CoV-2 reinfection rates in Kentucky during May through June 2021 among those who'd had confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection between March and December 2020.

The NEDSS data were then imported into a REDCap database that tracks new COVID-19 cases. A case-patient was defined as a resident with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in 2020 and a subsequent positive test result during May 1, 2021, through June 30, 2021.

Vaccination status was determined using data from the Kentucky Immunization Registry. Patients were considered fully vaccinated if a single dose of Johnson & Johnson or a second dose of an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) had been administered at least 14 days before reinfection. Compared to fully vaccinated residents, unvaccinated residents were 2.34 times more likely to test positive for SARS-CoV-2 reinfection.

The Obvious Flaw in CDC's Study

The elephant in the room, however, is the absence of actual symptomatic illness. The study only looked at positive test results, and we do not know whether more vaccinated people were symptomatic than the unvaccinated, or vice versa.

As has been explained many times before, a positive test result is not the same as active infection. A person with natural immunity may be re-exposed to the virus, and traces of it may show upon testing, but their immune system has effectively killed the virus and prevented illness.

So, merely looking at positive test results is not the best way to ascertain whether the COVID jab actually provides better protection than natural immunity. And there are many reasons to suspect that it does not.