Of course the uber-boosted are the ones being infected

Rejecting another Berenson blunder.

This Tuesday, Alex Berenson decided to waste his readers’ time (again) by histrionically highlighting two recent, unimpressive papers fashioned out of typically low-resolution American healthcare system data sets.

Here is his post, now unlocked:

URGENT: Two new studies show mRNA-jabbed people have a much higher risk of getting Covid than unvaccinated people

One of the papers is a propagandistic attempt to statistically massage all-cause mortality outcomes to somehow slander natural immunity. After a cursory glance, I am not touching that paper (or whatever Berenson imagines he has uncovered within its results) with a metaphorical ten foot pole.¹

The other paper seems to be oppositional propaganda, as it originates from Nabin Shrestha, who in a previous paper concerning Cleveland Clinic healthcare workers somewhat quixotically attempted to affirm natural immunity just as the experimental Covid vaccines became available to the general adult population, in June, 2021.

Shrestha’s new paper is merely showing that the uber-boosted have passed the equilibrium point where the lower susceptibility conferred by the vaccine ceases to outperform post-Omicron natural immunity saturation among the less than uber-boosted, and now the former are racking up cases at a higher rate as they must finally play catchup.

I have modeled the conditions leading to equilibrium. Here, the virus is depicted as a fish-hunting sea-lion; and the experimental injections as a partially effective camouflage that makes fish blend in with their background. As such, even if the effectiveness of the camouflage does not change over time, eventually the sea lion runs out of easy-to-catch prey, and the camouflaged are caught at just as high, or higher a rate as the other pools of fish:

The sea lion fish squares (SLFS) model predicts positive efficacy in the Delta era, negative efficacy for the “primary”-dosed (1 or 2 shots) in the first Omicron winter, negative efficacy for the triple+-dosed in the post-BA.5 era. Although this simplifies the transition between Delta and Omicron, this is roughly what we have seen.

It is thus clear why the uber-boosted have now slipped into apparent “negative infection efficacy” (as well as neutral severe efficacy) in a real-time view; regardless of whether they have actually had more total infections to-date: They are finally catching up with everyone else.

This is not to dismiss the possibility that the injections are becoming less and less effective, or even veering into negative efficacy; only to demonstrate how insufficient a spot-check of infection rates from this summer or autumn is to offer proof of such a calamity. It is no longer useful to compare the uber-boosted to other groups, who have so much more natural immunity, in real-time.

Support for this “catch-up” explanation for the higher infection rate observed by Shrestha, et al., and hyped as some catastrophe by Berenson, are both present in this paper’s own results as well as my analysis of the “BA.5 summer survey” paper.

For the former:

Shrestha, NK. et al. Fig. 1. Those with the most infections in the study window are those with the least recent natural immunity. Yawn.

For the latter:

The BA.5 Summer Survey Study

Any further discussion of this topic on my part would completely waste the reader’s time.

Merry Christmas Eve, and thanks for subscribing to Unglossed!

Related: Further discussion of this topic on my part:

Trollish Study Challenge / Poll

It Will Always Be Catch-Up Effect

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1. Update: I did, eventually, look at the other paper:

Tu, W. et al. “SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Hospitalization, and Death in Vaccinated and Infected Individuals by Age Groups in Indiana, 2021‒2022.” Am J Public Health. 2023 Jan;113(1):96-104.

What Berenson proposes, is that because this paper finds that infection efficacy in the most favorable 1 to 6 month post-dose window, is only almost as good as natural immunity, infection efficacy is somehow… what? Negative? I would like to somewhat brazenly make the claim that comparing post-injection immunity to natural immunity, and finding the former lacking, is not, in late 2022, fodder for some “urgent” headline. Berenson further berates his reader that the “real” picture must be much, much worse — because imagine how bad the numbers would look if this paper didn’t use a favorable time-window!

They also stopped counting cases only after six months in each recipient. In other words, the study would not count Omicron infections in people vaccinated or infected before mid-June 2021 - and Omicron is known to defeat the vaccines more easily than earlier variants.

In other words, even in the period of maximum vaccine effectiveness, and even excluding many Omicron infections, almost 7 percent of vaccine recipients were infected in this study.

Brave, groundbreaking journalistic work, here.