I was alerted by a friend to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Marty Makary. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, chief medical adviser to Sesame Care, and author of “The Price We Pay.” Dr. Makary has been heavily involved in the tracking of the COVID caseload here and around the world.
We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
Makary points out that the number of new cases is down 77% over the last month and a half. Why? Makary notes:
“In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.”
This is not due to the vaccines. Makary is saying that the 20-25 million people who have received the vaccine certainly help but are relatively small potatoes compared to the 165-180 million who have natural immunity.
Makary reports that “the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.”
The current trends indicate that the country is racing towards a very low level of infection. As more people are exposed and get the infection (with or without symptoms), there are fewer people who can get the infection. This is what herd immunity is all about.
PIC
As Mark Wauck notes:
The key phrase is “natural immunity.” That’s what experts like Yeadon and Bhakdi have been talking about…
You’ll recall that, early on, we were told that the only way to develop immunity to the new coronavirus was to develop “antibodies.” Brace yourselves–it turns out that’s not exactly true. We, or those who were paying attention, learned about T-Cell immunity–a phenomenon that is well known to researchers but was being concealed from the public (emphasis added).
Here’s the thing about T-Cell immunity–it can be acquired “analogically” and it lasts for a long, long time. When I say “analogically” think of milk maids who were constantly exposed to cowpox and therefore developed immunity to the different, but very deadly, human disease of smallpox. Similarly, humans are constantly exposed to the common cold coronaviruses develop T-Cell immunity to coronaviruses of all sorts–not just to the coronaviruses that causes the common cold, including Covid. This is what Makary is talking about when he uses the term “natural immunity”.
Makary notes that survivors of the Spanish Flu (1918-20) were found in 2008 to have memory cells that were still able to produce neutralizing antibodies. Makary went on to express that the percentage of people mounting a T-cell response after mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infection consistently exceeded the percentage with detectable antibodies. T-cell immunity was even present in people who were exposed to infected family members but never developed symptoms.
It is important to remember this last fact. Asymptomatic infections are a much larger portion of infections than has been publicized. Such asymptomatic infections still trigger the development of natural immunity. Why hasn’t this fact been broadcast by the media?
While Makary is careful not to venture into the murky sea of mass vaccination, one has to ask the obvious question. Is massive coerced vaccination a good idea? Some segments of the population (think seniors and other such groups) may benefit from the additional protections of a “vaccine” (Is mRNA really a vaccine?) just as some do from the flu shot. However, there are deleterious side effects that are significant in some individuals. How does one evaluate that against highly efficacious treatment protocols with safe drugs with long track records (think hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin)?
Also note that this vaccine is an additional protection. If more than half the population has already developed natural immunity, are the potential side effects a necessary price for these people to pay?
The next obvious question is why was T-cell immunity ignored in the fashioning of a response to this “novel” coronavirus? As we can see, this virus is less “novel” than we were led to believe.
As Michael Yeadon from the UK noted there were no clinical immunological or virological experts on any of the task forces charged with coming up with a plan to combat this virus. Why not?
Dr. Yeadon reported:
Government’s response to emergencies is guided by the scientific group who sit together under the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or SAGE. So they should provide scientific advice to the government about what’s appropriate to do. SAGE has got several things wrong, and that has led to advice that’s inappropriate and not only has had horrible economic effects, but has had continuing medical effects in that people are no longer being treated properly.
SAGE took the view that since SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus that they believed there wouldn’t be any immunity at all in the population. So, I think that’s the first thing. I remember hearing that and I was puzzled, because I already knew – because I read the scientific literature that SARS-CoV-2 was 80% similar to another virus you may have heard of called SARS that moved around the world a bit in 2003, and more than that: it’s quite similar, in pieces of it, to common cold-causing coronaviruses.
So, when I heard that there was this coronavirus moving across the world I wasn’t as worried as perhaps other people were, because I figured that since there are four common cold-causing coronaviruses, I figured that quite a lot of the population had been exposed to one of those viruses, and would probably have a perhaps substantial protective immunity.”
As we all remember, there was a huge ground swell of media coverage that this was a novel virus that would sweep through the population like the Spanish Flu. Nobody would have antibodies to this virus and it therefore had the potential to decimate the population. Potentially tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people would perish.
Antibodies aren’t the whole story. In fact, as the number of new cases diminishes, the level of antibody protection will diminish. Do not believe the story that, because the antibody levels fall away, you’ve lost immunity. That’s just not the way the human immune system works. The more important item is T-cell protection.
We have been hearing that “protection” from a vaccine may only last a matter of months. However, this is an incomplete picture of the human immune response. This piece of the narrative is just another method of scaring the public about how dangerous this new virus is. It is another way to keep unconstitutional restrictions in place.
To get a fuller picture about COVID-19 immunity, an extremely important piece of the immunity story is T-cell immunity. How long does the protection afforded by T-cells last?
Dr. Yeadon notes:
The most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 is multiple years. Why do I say that? We actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world 17 years ago called SARS, and remember SARS-CoV-2 is 80% similar to SARS, so I think that’s the best comparison that anyone can provide.
The evidence is clear. These very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived SARS 17 years ago. They took a blood sample, and they tested whether they responded or not to the original SARS, and they all did. They all have perfectly normal, robust T-cell memory. They are actually also protected against SARS-CoV-2 because it’s so similar, it’s cross-immunity.
So, I would say the best data that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years. I think it’s entirely possible that it is lifelong. The style of the responses of these people’s T-cells were the same as if you’ve been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see, has that immunity been retained? And so I think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years, and possibly lifelong.
This is information that you will not find in the MSM. The current push in the MSM is that there are “variants” of COVID-19 which might be much more dangerous than the current strain. One or two even have names. The UK strain and the South African strain. This type of naming is in and of itself illuminating. I guess the prohibition against using localities to identify specific viruses has now been lifted since Beijing Biden has been installed as the dictator president of America.
If SARS from the early part of the century is providing protection either in the form of mild or asymptomatic cases and it is only 80% similar, how much more protection should one have from the COVID-19 variants? No one can say for sure. However, it does seem likely that such significant protections exist.
It is time for all mask mandates and mandated social mitigation measures to end. The problem? Politicians NEVER want to give up power that they have obtained. So, this will mean a continuing battle in the political and well as PR arenas. Being steadfast in this battle is paramount. Only by being steadfast in the face of this battle for the soul of our country, can we hope to return to normal in America.