Whenever the pandemic hustlers — namely, the media and the “experts” — urge the public to “follow the science,” what they really mean is “Do as we say and don’t ask questions,” even if they don’t say so explicitly.
But patience is apparently running thin as a sizable portion of adults is still uninterested in receiving any of the COVID vaccines, so it looks like at least some of these nags are ready to be a little more upfront.
Leana Wen, one of the “experts” regularly on CNN, wrote Tuesday in the Washington Post that there are legitimate reasons that people who have already been exposed to and recovered from COVID don’t feel that it’s necessary to get vaccinated. Nonetheless, she said, “there are simple responses to these arguments.”
Those “simple responses,” according to Wen, more or less come down to: Just do it.
“All eligible people 12 and above — including those who were previously infected such as that professor — would be better off getting the vaccine and should be required to do so,” she wrote. “Vaccines for younger children must be an urgent priority and, once authorized, should also be mandated.”
That’s the second paragraph of Wen’s piece. She didn’t even build up to the prescription that we all just go along with whatever she wants. (As an aside, that same day’s issue of the Post had a separate column headlined, “What Dr. Leana Wen’s improbable journey says about our country,” and it was about Wen’s memoirs about herself. It’s perhaps no wonder Wen is so sure about Wen’s demands about what you do to your body.)
What followed were another several paragraphs on the very scant evidence supporting the theory that receiving a vaccine dose offers better protection for individuals even if they already have antibodies from a previous natural infection.
The one cited by Wen with the most scientific weight behind it was a report put out last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which Wen said “concluded that … vaccinated people have half the risk of reinfection compared with previously infected people who remained unvaccinated.”
That sounds pretty authoritative, but it really isn’t. That particular report acknowledged at the conclusion that because it was so limited in scope, “these findings cannot be used to infer causation” between a lack of vaccination of those with antibodies and reinfection. But looking at the data reflecting a small population in Kentucky from May through June, there seemed to be a pattern showing that more unvaccinated people were reinfected with COVID-19 than those who had also previously been infected and received a vaccine.
A major problem with that study, by its author’s own admission, is that “persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested,” and thus, “the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated.”
In other words, there are quite possibly and probably a lot of people who both had antibodies and were vaccinated yet were still reinfected but were left out of the study because they didn’t bother getting tested.
It would be like counting the total number of people in a high-crime neighborhood who report seeing suspicious activity outside their homes to the police and dividing it up between those who had their doors and windows double-barred and bolted and those who had no locks at all. People with confidence that they’re safe inside would understandably be less likely to call the police, but that doesn’t mean something suspect didn’t happen outside their homes as often as the others.
Maybe vaccinated people with antibodies really are more protected against reinfection than unvaccinated people with the same antibodies. The jury is out. To wit, the National Institutes of Health said back in March that natural antibody protection against the virus “is comparable” to the protection afforded by vaccines.
What are you talking about?! Just get the vaccines! Get them all!
I have no opinion on whether people who have recovered from COVID should also receive a dose of vaccine. But if the pandemic hustlers are going to insist that they do, they’re going to have to do better than Wen.
