SUMMARY: Despite the incessant mantra of “safe and effective,” those who have received the most COVID-19 vaccines are proving to be at higher risk of contracting the very disease they are trying to avoid, than people who have said no to the same shots. But why? And given the implications of this, why are mandates still in existence?
By Rick Rydell
These days, your neighborhood pharmacy is good for far more than mere bandages, medicine, and last-minute party gifts. Did you know that Walgreens has also been collecting mass amounts of information useful to your COVID-19-related decisions?
Indeed, Walgreens operates a website which lists the weekly COVID-19 positivity rate for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Pharmacists gather this data from over 5,000 of their more than 7,000 stores. And what those numbers reveal is fascinating.
Walgreens breaks the vaccinated customers into different categories based on time since their most recent vaccine dose. During the week of October 30–November 5, 2022, for example, the unvaccinated were the least likely category to test positive for COVID-19 with a 22.8% positivity rate.
Those who got their last COVID-19 vaccine 9 to 11 months ago, meanwhile, had the highest positivity rate at 36.5%. Following behind were those jabbed more than a year ago (33.3%), three to five months ago (32.7%), six to eight months ago (32.6%), and less than three months ago (23.3%).
It’s even worse for those receiving boosters, which can now mean up to five COVID-19 shots. Because of something called “original antigenic sin,” your body’s ability to respond to a new viral infection lessens with each passing shot. It simply cannot respond as quickly in as great immunological numbers to each individual genetic instruction as it could to the original pathogen.
Dr. Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and inventor of vaccines remarks:
“Where this matters is if you keep giving booster doses with [the original] strain, and continue to lock people into that original response., It makes it harder for them to respond then to essentially a completely different virus.”
Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology & Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had this to say:
“It is true that the best boosts typically are the ones that are given infrequently, that immunologically, if you boost too much and too frequently, then you often have a lower immune response at the end,” says.
Numbers Numb
Unlike clinical trials, the Walgreens data is a snapshot of real-world people, including the boosted. Thinking critically about this pharmacy’s hard data statistics is important. After all, we want the truth; not just what appears to agree with what we already believe. Could that be the case with these numbers?
Critics may say the Walgreens data is, at least in part, due to the unvaccinated testing more frequently, thus creating a larger pool of people to dilute the positive results. And according to Walgreens, yes, the unvaccinated are testing at a greater rate than the vaccinated. But still, the result is the same: the un-jabbed are not testing positive at the same rates as the jabbed… even the boosted.
Could this data perhaps explain, at least in part, the underlying reason for headlines such as “Boosted Californians Getting COVID At Twice The Rate Of Those Vaccinated But Not Boosted”; “More of the vaccinated, boosted winding up in NC’s hospitals with COVID. Why?” and “Why boosted Americans seem to be getting more COVID-19 infections” in mainstream media outlets?
Interestingly, in June 2022, Walgreens changed the way they report COVID-19 data. Before that time, they reported it by whether you had one, two, or three doses of any COVID-19 vaccine, and whether doses two or three were greater or less than five months ago.
Their June data indicated that those who had their third dose less than five months prior were testing positive 25% more often than those with their second shot less than five months prior. And those with their third shot greater than five months prior were testing positive 7% more often than those with only their second shot.
In both instances, the boosted tested positive more often for COVID-19 than those who were un-boosted.
The Walgreens data has been a thorn in the side for many vaccine advocates. Some even attempted to debunk the explicit data from Walgreens. In their attempt, however, they admitted something that most have known all along. From SciCheck’s COVID-19 Vaccination Project:
“Patients who survived [COVID-19] were likely to benefit from natural immunity which provides some protection against future infections, further lowering the reported positivity rate in the unvaccinated group.”
A major problem with proving or disproving the quote above, is that you would be hard-pressed to find a study on vaccine efficacy that actually took accurate widespread natural immunity into account when comparing groups.
Instead, what past studies have lazily (or even purposefully) done was lump the unvaccinated who were COVID-19-recovered with those who had never had COVID-19 (termed “Covid naïve”).
Moreover, common sense tells us that plenty of people who have developed immunity to COVID-19 without being vaccinated for it never actually got tested for antibodies, because why would they need to?
Nearly all of humanity followed this practice when it came to major illnesses, after all. Once you had an illness and recovered from it, you didn’t spend significant chunks of your life worrying about getting it again, nor did you seek a scientific crystal ball to see if you possibly could catch it repeatedly. This lack of research does not allow for studying of the effects of actual, real-time natural immunity.
Walgreens isn’t the only company with data to show that the boosted struggle with COVID-19 more than other groups. Kaiser recently released a study showing negative efficacy of the shots against all variants within 150 days. Digging further, Kaiser’s study demonstrated that the more boosters you roll up your sleeve for, the more you open yourself up to COVID-19.
As time passed, those with three jabs caught it more frequently than those with fewer. Additionally, a study in The Lancet said, “Surprisingly, we observed a higher risk of test positivity after vaccination with one or two doses across all BMI groups,” than the unvaccinated.
The Nitty-Gritty
Antibodies: COVID-19 vaccines produce different antibody responses than COVID-19 infection. Two of the types of antibodies that the SARS-CoV-2 virus creates are anti-spike (anti-S1) and anti-nucleocapsid (anti-N). COVID-19 vaccines produce only anti-S1 type antibodies, whereas infection produces both anti-S1 and anti-N type antibodies.
This production is because when infected, a person’s immune system sees the entire virus and has the chance to build an immune response to all portions of the virus. A person who has been vaccinated is only exposed to the spike protein portion of the virus, since vaccines were designed based on just one portion of the virus.
Again, common sense suggests that a variety of antibodies—more types of biological defenses—are preferable to just one when it comes to warding off disease and its effects, especially when dealing with a virus that is constantly mutating.
Myopically, most studies have focused on the fact that those who are vaccinated initially develop a very high antibody response to the spike protein, with their anti-S1 antibodies being much higher than those with natural immunity.
However, what the studies don’t take into account is that those with natural immunity have a broader overall response to the virus as a whole by developing both anti-S1 and anti-N antibodies.
One way to illustrate this immunological coverage: Imagine these antibody responses act as a wall. The vaccine response would be a beautiful 20-foot-high wall, but only five feet wide. In contrast, the natural immunity response would be a wall which is only eight feet tall but 50 feet wide.
Sure, some viruses may be able to get over an eight-foot wall. But far more viruses would be able to get around a 20-foot wall that was only five feet wide.
Demographics Dive
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates only one in four COVID-19 infections have actually been verified and reported. Even in August 2022, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator guessed from July CDC data that at least 70% of Americans previously had the dreaded disease.
From either set of numbers, this means there have been enough infections for a humongous portion of the nation to have had COVID-19 at least once, with some having it multiple times. If this is indeed the case, Americans can generally be categorized into two groups: Unvaccinated with natural immunity, and vaccinated with natural immunity.
With these two groups in mind, plus the data from Walgreens and Kaiser, we can surmise that the vaccine is weakening the immune system, and reducing natural immunity’s effectiveness.
Where To Go From Here
Not even the shot-happy military has passed a requirement for its service members to get boosted, but California has forced its healthcare workers to do so.
Workers with objections to that requirement supposedly have the option of a medical or religious exemption. Whether those exemptions are attainable or honored, however, is often dependent on the employer. Lawsuits are an option.
Stay vigilant against future encroachments on your freedom to choose what goes in your body. Schools may require not only the COVID-19 shot series, but a booster in the future, simply to attend.
Know what the studies on boosters say, and ensure that your local and state government officials do too. Above all, make decisions grounded in sound science—not the kind that is bought-and-paid-for, nor fear-based.
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Published on December 09, 2022.
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