Facts without theory are nonsense, and theory without facts is bullshit.
You have to have both. – Dr.Tetyana Obukhanych quoting her professor.
Pfizer Scientist Undercovers Video Say Natural Immunity Likely Better Than Covid vaccines. “Are you a doctor—a medical doctor?” asked Paul, a licensed medical doctor, at a hearing on Sept. 30.
“I have worked over thirty years on health policy,” answered Xavier Becerra, who is secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“You’re not a medical doctor. Do you have a science degree? And yet you travel the country calling people ‘flat earthers’ who have had COVID, looked at studies of millions of people, and make their own personal decision that the immunity they naturally acquired is sufficient.”
Paul was responding to Becerra’s claim, made during a Sept. 21 online forum, that “because some flat-earthers—especially those in places of influence—choose to peddle fiction, we’re losing more loved ones today than we were a few months ago.”
Becerra had also asserted that “the harm caused by those who lack confidence in and denigrate the vaccine cannot be overstated.”
“But you presume somehow to tell over 100 million Americans who’ve survived COVID that we have no right to determine our own care?” Paul continued. “You alone are on high, and you’ve made these decisions—a lawyer with no scientific background, no medical degree?”
Pfizer Scientists
While Becerra did not clearly answer Paul’s questions about natural immunity, others have stepped into the breach left by public health authorities.
On Oct. 4, a Project Veritas exposé revealed that multiple scientists at the COVID-19 vaccine maker Pfizer believe natural immunity is superior to the immunity conferred by their own product.
“When somebody is naturally immune, like, they got COVID they probably have, like, not better, but more antibodies against the virus,” said Nick Karl, a Pfizer biochemist.
“Because what the vaccine is—is, like I said, that protein—that’s just on the outside,” Karl continued, referring to the spike protein on the surface of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine replicates with the aim of inducing immunity.
“So it’s just one antibody against one specific part of the virus. When you actually get the virus, you’re going to start producing antibodies against, like, multiple pieces of virus—and not only just like the outside portion, like the inside portion, the actual virus,” Karl added.
“So, your antibodies are probably better at that point than the vaccination.”
Chris Croce, a senior associate scientist at Pfizer, told a Veritas journalist that natural immunity left people “protected most likely for longer [than vaccination] since there was a natural response.”
“If you have [COVID-19] antibodies built up, like, you should be able to prove that you have those built up,” said Rahul Khandke, another Pfizer scientist.
Yet media coverage of natural immunity sometimes seems designed to call its very existence into question.
Covering a district court judge’s decision to uphold the University of California’s vaccine mandate, Reuters placed the words “natural immunity”
in scare quotes.
What is natural immunity, exactly?
Does believing that natural immunity exists, or that it protects you better than the vaccine, make you a “flat earther”—or are Pfizer’s own researchers onto something?
Natural immunity is pretty straightforward: it’s the immunity that you get to a disease after recovering from it, as a result of your immune system remembering how to fight the pathogen the next time the two cross paths.
In slightly more technical terms, natural immunity involves the adaptive immune response. It could thus potentially include not only the antibody released in response to the spike protein but also other antibodies, along with various memory B and memory T cells—in short, the sort of broad and deep response that Pfizer’s Karl described in Veritas’ undercover interview.
In fact, vaccination is intended to mimic natural immunity by promoting a manageable immune response that does not cause serious illness.
CDC’s Explanation.
Yet despite these common-sense facts, the CDC’s web resource on natural immunity and vaccines is frustratingly vague and arguably misleading—it sidesteps the question of natural immunity’s superiority or inferiority to vaccine-induced immunity in order to emphasize the (real and serious)
dangers posed by many diseases for which vaccines are available:
“Some people believe that naturally acquired immunity—immunity from having the disease itself—is better than the immunity provided by vaccines. However, natural infections can cause severe complications and be deadly.”
With no explanation, and at a real cost to public trust and understanding,
the CDC has run together two separate claims:
The first claim—that infection with COVID-19 presents more risks than vaccination, particularly in older or obese individuals—may in fact be reasonable, though it is not the focus of this article.
If true, it would suggest that people should not intentionally contract the disease in order to gain natural immunity.
Yet the second claim—namely, that natural immunity to COVID-19 is
weaker than vaccine-induced immunity—does not stand up to scrutiny.
For one thing, it runs contrary to our experiences with past diseases.
Evidence
As Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), pointed out in a detailed Twitter thread on the duration of COVID-19 immunity, a 2008 Nature article showed that survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic were still able to mount an immune response to the 1918 virus roughly 90 years later.
Additionally, and as Paul noted while questioning Becerra, the CDC considers natural immunity, including presumptive natural immunity for those born before 1957, an acceptable substitute for measles vaccination.
Along similar lines, Army Regulation 40-562 states that prior infection and consequent natural immunity can be the grounds for a medical exemption from immunization—a regulation to which two active-duty service members have appealed in their lawsuit against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s vaccine mandate for all troops.
Early results from Denmark published in The Lancet in March 2021,
hinted at the protective value of infection.
In that study, which involved testing of 69 percent of the country’s population, prior infection was found to shield people reasonably well from reinfection, though less so among older groups.
And a September feature by The BMJ, a U.K.-based company that helps provide clinicians with medical information, summarized some of the older and newer research suggesting that natural immunity is as or more effective than vaccine-induced immunity.
Notably, an April 2021 study on the entire population of Israel found that vaccination by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was roughly as protective as prior infection.
An August 2021 study on data from Israeli’s Maccabi Healthcare Services went further, showing that prior infection was associated with greatly reduced risks of hospitalization and symptomatic illness than two doses of the vaccine among people who had never been infected.
Studies from Austria, Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, and other countries and organizations, as well as systematic reviews and similar summaries of previous research, have painted a similar picture: immunity from prior infection is as or more powerful than immunity from vaccination.
Further underlining the immune system’s resilience to infection, a very recent study from the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare showed that protective antibodies remained in the vast majority of those who had COVID-19, persisting twelve months after their initial infection.
Meanwhile, new research from Israel and Qatar has shown that the vaccine’s protective effects begin to wane several months after the second dose.
Passports And Mandates.
Outside the United States, many other countries acknowledge the protective effects of natural immunity.
As reported in Science, some countries, including Israel, France, and Italy, give one rather than two doses of vaccine to people previously infected by the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
England recognizes natural immunity when granting vaccine passports.
Under New York City’s “Key to NYC” program, by contrast, the passports that people 12 and older need to access indoor restaurants, gyms, and other spaces only recognize vaccination.
And while George Mason University (GMU) professor Todd Zywicki ultimately received an exemption to his institution’s vaccine mandate on the basis of his natural immunity, many others facing vaccine mandates have not been so lucky.
In August, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, rejected an emergency request from Indiana University Bloomington students challenging that institution’s vaccine mandate.
The students’ writ noted that the university’s mandate “does not include an exemption for those with natural immunity, including those who have previously been infected and fully recovered.”
The Epoch Times’ review of vaccine mandates “didn’t find a single school offering exemptions to students who had acquired immunity,” in line with mandates issued by various states and the federal government.
Censorship
If natural immunity to COVID-19 is real and significant, why is it being kept out of the conversation?
Pervasive censorship, including the silencing of knowledgeable physicians and scientists, may provide part of the answer.
The nonprofit Brownstone Institute claims that the social networking website LinkedIn is suppressing its content, including a piece from Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff in which Kulldorff argued that hospitals should not be firing unvaccinated nurses who have acquired natural immunity.
Facebook users have reported censorship or threats of censorship for sharing the Israeli natural immunity study, Project Veritas’ videos, and other content related to natural immunity.
The climate of speech suppression around COVID-19 is nothing new.
While Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who appeared to advocate greater censorship on the platform, was brought before the Senate and booked on “60 Minutes,” an earlier Facebook whistleblower to Project Veritas, Morgan Kahmann, was fired after he shared documents that revealed the company was secretly censoring content perceived to promote “vaccine hesitancy.”
Haugen apparently departed Facebook in May of this year, though her LinkedIn profile does not yet indicate that she has left the company. According to Kahmann’s most recent GiveSendGo update, he remains unemployed.
More troubling still, the Pfizer employees recorded by Project Veritas suggested a climate of censorship and self-censorship hobbles pharmaceutical researchers themselves.
“Oh God, I signed NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] against this,” said Karl.
“You don’t talk about anything that can possibly implicate you or, like, Big Pharma,” said Croce. “Even if you shut the door to the office, it’s kind of like, who’s listening?”
Pfizer Scientist Undercovers Video Say Natural Immunity Likely Better Than Covid vaccines An overwhelming volume of research makes it clear that this hormone produced in our skin can save lives…
BY JOSEPH MERCOLA
The Effects of Vitamin D and Covid – Related Outcomes
Do you know your vitamin D level? If not, getting your blood tested—and optimizing your levels—is one of the simplest and most straightforward steps you can take to improve your health, including in relation to COVID-19. Vitamin D, as an immunomodulator, is a perfect candidate for countering the immune dysregulation that’s common with COVID-19.
As early as November 2020, it was known that there were striking differences in vitamin D status among people who had asymptomatic COVID-19 and those who became severely ill and required intensive care unit (ICU) care.
In one study, 32.96 percent of those with asymptomatic cases were vitamin D deficient, compared to 96.82 percent of those who were admitted to the ICU for a severe case.
COVID-19 patients who were deficient in this inexpensive and widely available vitamin had a higher inflammatory response and a greater fatality rate. The Indian study authors recommended “mass administration of vitamin D supplements to populations at risk for COVID-19,” in a study published in Scientific Reports, but this hasn’t happened, at least not in the United States.
As of April 21, the date the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) last updated its COVID-19 treatment guidelines/vitamin D page, the agency stated, “There are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of vitamin D for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19.”
As you’ll see in the paragraphs that follow, however, the evidence for its use is beyond overwhelming.
Vitamin D Therapy Reduces COVID’s Inflammatory Storm.
Vitamin D has multiple actions on the immune system, including enhancing the production of antimicrobial peptides by immune cells, reducing damaging pro-inflammatory cytokines, and promoting the expression of anti-inflammatory cytokines. Cytokines are a group of proteins that your body uses to control inflammation.
If you have an infection, your body will release cytokines to help combat inflammation, but sometimes, it releases more than it should. If the cytokine release spirals out of control, the resulting “cytokine storm” becomes dangerous and is closely tied to sepsis, which may be an important contributor to the death of COVID-19 patients.
Many COVID-19 therapeutics are focused on viral elimination instead of modulating the hyperinflammation often seen in the disease. In fact, uncontrolled immune response has been suggested as a factor in disease severity, making immunomodulation “an attractive potential treatment strategy,” wrote researchers from Singapore in a study published in Nutrition.
In one study published in Scientific Reports in May, researchers investigated the effects of Pulse D therapy—daily high-dose supplementation (60,000 IUs) of vitamin D—for eight to 10 days, in addition to standard therapy, for COVID-19 patients deficient in vitamin D. Vitamin D levels increased significantly in the vitamin D group—from 16 ng/ml to 89 ng/ml—while inflammatory markers significantly decreased, without any side effects.
“Vit.D acts as a smart switch to decrease the Th1 response and pro-inflammatory cytokines while enhancing the production of anti-inflammatory cytokines in cases of immune dysregulation. It is pertinent to note that SARS-CoV-2 virus activates Th1 response and suppresses Th2 response,” they wrote.
They concluded that Pulse D therapy could be safely added to COVID-19 treatment protocols for improved outcomes.
Vitamin D3 Reduces COVID-19 Deaths, ICU Admissions.
Another group of researchers in Spain gave vitamin D3 (calcifediol) to patients admitted to the COVID-19 wards of Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar. About half the patients received vitamin D3 in the amount of 21,280 IU on day one plus 10,640 IU on days 3, 7, 15, and 30. Those that received vitamin D fared significantly better, with only 4.5 percent requiring ICU admission compared to 21 percent in the no-vitamin D group.
Vitamin D treatment also significantly reduced mortality, with 4.7 percent of the vitamin D group dying at admission, compared to 15.9 percent in the non-vitamin D group.
“In patients hospitalized with COVID-19, calcifediol treatment significantly reduced ICU admission and mortality,” the researchers also wrote in the
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. In response to the findings,
British MP David Davis tweeted:
“This is a very important study on vitamin D and Covid-19. Its findings are incredibly clear. An 80 percent reduction in need for ICU and a 60 percent reduction in deaths, simply by giving a very cheap and very safe therapy – calcifediol, or activated vitamin D … The findings of this large and well-conducted study should result in this therapy being administered to every COVID patient in every hospital in the temperate latitudes.”
At one point, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service was offering free vitamin D supplements to people at high risk from COVID-19, but they also state, like the U.S. NIH, “there is currently not enough evidence to support taking vitamin D to prevent or treat COVID-19.”
While their guidance does urge Britons to take a vitamin D supplement between October and March “to keep your bones and muscles healthy,” it only recommends a dose of 400 IUs a day, which is easily 20 times lower than what most people require for general health and optimal immune function.
Dose matters when it comes to COVID-19 recovery. In a randomized clinical trial in Saudi Arabia, researchers compared daily supplementation with either 5,000 IUs or 1,000 IUs oral vitamin D3 among patients with suboptimal vitamin D levels hospitalized for mild to moderate COVID-19. Those in the 5,000 IUs group had a significantly shorter time to recovery for cough and loss of the sense of taste compared to the 1,000 IUs group.
According to the researchers, “The use of 5000 IU vitamin D3 as an adjuvant therapy for COVID-19 patients with suboptimal vitamin D status, even for a short duration, is recommended.”
Hospitalized With COVID-19? Ask for Vitamin D.
The evidence continues to grow that treatment with vitamin D leads to significantly better outcomes for people hospitalized with COVID-19. In another example from Spain, hospitalized COVID-19 patients who received vitamin D3 had a mortality rate of 5 percent, compared to 20 percent for those who did not. The researchers explained:
“The protective effect of calcifediol [activated vitamin D] remained significant after adjustment for multiple confounder factors related to severity disease even after selecting those subjects who were older (≥65 years) and had worse oxygen saturation levels at admission (<96 percent).”
Similarly, 76 consecutive patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at Reina Sofia University Hospital in Córdoba, Spain, were randomized to receive either standard care or standard care plus vitamin D3 to rapidly increase vitamin D levels.
Of 50 treated with vitamin D, only one person was admitted to the ICU. Of 26 who were not treated with vitamin D, 13 (50 percent) required admission to the hospital. Researchers noted,
“Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce the severity of the disease.”
Further: “Of the patients treated with calcifediol, none died, and all were discharged, without complications. The 13 patients not treated with calcifediol, who were not admitted to the ICU, were discharged. Of the 13 patients admitted to the ICU, two died and the remaining 11 were discharged.”
In a previous review, the researchers explained that vitamin D has favorable effects during both the early viraemic phase of COVID-19 as well as the later hyperinflammatory phase, including for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a lung condition that’s common in severe COVID-19 cases, which causes low blood oxygen and fluid buildup in the lungs.
“Based on many preclinical studies and observational data in humans, ARDS may be aggravated by vitamin D deficiency and tapered down by activation of the vitamin D receptor,” they wrote in a study published in The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology “Based on a pilot study, oral calcifediol may be the most promising approach.”
Even regular “booster” doses of vitamin D, regardless of baseline levels, appear to be effective in reducing the risk of mortality in people admitted to the hospital with COVID-19, particularly for the elderly.
“This inexpensive and widely available treatment could have positive implications for the management of COVID-19 worldwide, particularly in developing nations,” researchers from the United Kingdom noted.
Low Vitamin D Levels May Increase Death Risk.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation included 13 studies involving 2,933 COVID-19 patients. Vitamin D was a clear winner, with use in COVID-19 patients significantly associated with reduced ICU admission and mortality, along with a reduced risk of adverse outcomes, particularly when given after COVID-19 diagnosis.
When it comes to data to support the use of vitamin D for COVID-19, 87 studies have been performed by 784 scientists. The results show:
53 percent improvement in 28 treatment trials
56 percent improvement in 59 sufficiency studies
63 percent improvement in 16 treatment mortality results
A number of clinical trials are also underway, looking further into the use of vitamin D for COVID-19, including one by Harvard Medical School researchers investigating whether taking daily vitamin D reduces COVID-19 disease severity in those newly diagnosed as well as reducing the risk of infection in household contacts.
‘A Simple and Inexpensive Measure’.
Some positive advances have already occurred that could make this potentially lifesaving strategy more widely used. The French National Academy of Medicine issued a statement in May 2020, referring to the use of vitamin D as a “simple and inexpensive measure that is reimbursed by the French National Health Insurance” and detailing the importance of vitamin D for COVID-19.
For COVID-19 patients over 60, they recommend vitamin D testing and if deficiency is found, a bolus dose of 50,000 to 100,000 IU. For anyone under the age of 60 who receives a positive COVID-19 test, they advise taking 800 IUs to 1,000 IUs of vitamin D per day. A vitamin D review paper published in the journal Nutrients in April 2020 recommends higher amounts, however, stating:
“To reduce the risk of infection, it is recommended that people at risk of influenza and/or COVID-19 consider taking 10,000 IU/d of vitamin D3 for a few weeks to rapidly raise 25(OH)D concentrations, followed by 5000 IU/d.
“The goal should be to raise 25(OH)D concentrations above 40-60 ng/mL (100-150 nmol/L). For treatment of people who become infected with COVID-19, higher vitamin D3 doses might be useful.”
The best way to know how much vitamin D you need is to have your levels tested. Data from GrassrootsHealth’s D*Action studies suggest the optimal level for health and disease prevention is between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL, while the cutoff for sufficiency appears to be around 40 ng/mL. In Europe, the measurements you’re looking for are 150 to 200 nmol/L and 100 nmol/L, respectively.
Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder of Mercola.com. An osteopathic physician, best-selling author, and recipient of multiple awards in the field of natural health, his primary vision is to change the modern health paradigm by providing people with a valuable resource to help them take control of their health. This article was originally published on Mercola.com
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