The CDC Finally Admits That Natural Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Is Superior to the Immunity Induced by COVID-19 Vaccines...but holds onto its other lies

Thank goodness for Jeremy Hammond, who can call out the CDC on their lies and withholding of data.  The NY Times added to his reportage 10 days later.

As Apoorva Mandavilli wrote in the NY Times 2 days ago,

But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

Ms. Nordlund [the CDC's spokesperson] confirmed that as one of the reasons [why CDC has withheld the facts from the public--Nass].

You just can't make this stuff up.  Below, Jeremy fills out the story with historical context.  Please go to the link to read his entire report. 

In October 2020, two months before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first granted emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who went on to become director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under the Biden administration, claimed that vaccines would be needed to achieve herd immunity because “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”.

That was a lie.

At the time Walensky made that bold statement, studies had already shown that, in addition to effective cellular immune responses, neutralizing antibodies induced by infection were persistent in the blood of almost all people who recovered. Additionally, it was known that infection induced memory responses, with indications of the induction of long-lived bone marrow plasma cells—a known immunologic marker of long-term immunity—that could rapidly churn out more antibodies in the event of reexposure to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The claim that the vaccines would confer herd immunity by stopping infection and transmission and thereby bring the pandemic to an end proved to be a false promise. The induced sterilizing immunity, or ability of circulating antibodies to stop infection, wanes rapidly so that fully vaccinated people can become infected and spread the virus to others.

Walensky herself publicly admitted this in August 2021 after CDC researchers had learned that 74% of COVID-19 cases in a large outbreak in Massachusetts were fully vaccinated people and that the amount of virus shed by vaccinated people was just as high as that of the unvaccinated, suggesting equal contagiousness. (It was this finding that prompted the CDC to reverse its mask guidance, shifting from telling fully vaccinated people that they no longer needed to wear a mask to telling them that they needed to mask up once again.)

After the FDA issued emergency use authorization for COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020, the CDC claimed that the available evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived.

That, again, was a demonstrable lie.

That falsehood was eventually removed from the CDC’s website only to be replaced with a recommendation for people who’ve recovered from infection to still get vaccinated on the grounds that the duration of natural immunity remained unknown.

Thus, while no longer outright lying, the CDC continued to deceive the public by deliberately withholding the fact that studies had shown that infection was likely to induce long-term immunity.

“…there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection…”

Indeed, in May 2021, scientists confirmed that infection induced differentiation of memory B cells into long-lived bone marrow plasma cells, an immunological marker of long-term immunity. Yet the CDC persisted in its deceitful message that even people who already recovered from infection needed to get fully vaccinated on the implicit grounds that natural immunity might be short-lived.

Then, in August 2021, the CDC went even further by explicitly claiming that the evidence suggested that “people get better protection by being fully vaccinated compared with having had COVID-19.”

That was yet another outright lie, even more egregious than the CDC’s earlier disinformation.

In fact, by that time, studies had overwhelmingly shown natural immunity to be both broader and more durable than the immunity induced by vaccines....