An anti-vaccination Trumpist comes at me on Tumblr

[In reply to an earlier post on Tumblr] This didn’t age well. The CDC has come out supporting the FACT that the jabs do NOTHING but allegedly make you less ill, as if that can be measured. You still get it, spread it, and get sick from a CCP flu with a 90% survivability. CDC says natural immunity SIX TIMES stronger than the jab. CDC admitted spiking the death numbers.... The GOP via PDJT got the vaccine y’all denied first, and now you worship. The military is proving the injury numbers. But, keep spreading your poo.

Except none of this is true.

I think I know what you're conflating, because I've seen other anti-vaccination activists conflating the same thing. And that's that the CDC have said that monoclonal antibody therapy based on earlier variants of COVID is not effective against omicron cases. That's true, but very different to "the jabs do NOTHING but allegedly make you less ill, as if that can be measured."

For one thing, that can be measured. It is being measured, in an ongoing fashion. Here's a recent, large-number, and incredibly good news paper out on the effects of just the basic two-shot vaccination, showing that Long COVID symptom presentation went to zero for vaccinated individuals.

Zero. As in no more likely to show those symptoms than someone who has not had COVID. That's zero.

So we can measure this. We do measure this. The numbers are very, very clear. Vaccination - particularly once boosted - strongly reduces case severity, and strongly reduces death rates.

Now, what you call "natural immunity" here isn't even a thing. It's not that you were immune, or even became immune, so I'll try to address it as what it is - post-infection resistance to later re-infection.

The problem with this approach in general, of course, is that it exposes you to all of the dangers of COVID in order to get that post-infection resistance. And it's not the 1%ish death rate that matters here nearly as much as the no less than 20% rate (pre-omicron) of long-term major organ damage even including mild cases.

It appears that this 20% number may drop to around 10% with omicron, at least, in children. I kinda hope that's true - I'd rather it be 0% - but even that sharp reduction is still a disaster, and still terrible for long-term, ongoing damage to health.

But let's get back to that "natural immunity" itself, which is to say, again, "post-infection resistance to reinfection."

We know from published data that post-omicron resistance to delta is about 70%, in the short term. I emphasise that this is the short term, because we know that omicron can create new illness again in someone who has already had omicron in as little as two months, because that has also happened.

We also know that post-booster resistance to delta is around 95%, and to omicron, around 90% at peak.

90% (vaccination plus booster) is much higher than 70% (getting and surviving omicron)

0% major organ damage (vaccination plus booster) is much less than 10-20% (getting and surviving COVID).

"Natural resistance" - which again in reality means post-infection resistance to re-infection - is much worse, by the numbers, by the hard facts on the ground. Not six times better.

Now, I think where the "six times" number you're presenting may come from is the fact that the initial two-dose vaccination's ability to completely prevent disease does decline sharply over time, to as low as 20% depending upon the study.

Its ability to prevent severe disease and death does not decline, because the whole point of this is to tell your body's natural immune system how to fight the disease, and the body remembers. You can see that clearly in numbers.

But once the initial antibody wave fades, it's remembered in what amounts to long-term immunological memory - T-cells and all that. And antibody production takes some time to ramp back up once the knowledge is stored away down there, which is why you can get breakthrough cases after being vaccinated. But disease severity is dramatically - dramatically! - reduced.

(The exact same thing happened with polio - it took years of boosters to wipe out polio, and that's why boosters exist.)

The mRNA COVID booster shot raises that antibody resistance back up to a solid 90% for a while - for how long, we don't know yet, but long enough to matter. (I was honestly surprised it was that effective, but that's the most recent study data I've seen. I'd link it but I seem to have misplaced the link.)

But what also kicks that immunological response back up is getting a mild, no-long-term-damage case of any COVID variant AFTER having had both initial vaccination shots.

But again, that only works after having been fully vaccinated.

When you have been fully vaccinated, even if antibody levels have returned to normal, getting a mild breakthrough infection absolutely does boost your antibody response back up, in much the same way as a booster shot does, only maybe even better.

So if your breakthough-upon-exposure resistance is down to 20% - a very low number but I've seen it in in a small study - and the booster shot takes it to 90%, and getting mild omicron takes it to, I don't know, let's say 95%... that gets you close to that six times number you present. I suspect that's where "six times" came from.

But you have to have had the initial vaccination sequence for that to work. That's where the lie comes in.

There's still that chance of severe disease and death, mind you. But at least there's no longer - statistically speaking - any chance of Long COVID. And that matters a lot.

Now, I know, you won't pay attention to any of this. I kinda feel - as someone who has done original research and had her work presented and published in actual science journals, and used by other people doing original science to do more original science - that I have to try. But I know you've made this identitarian and will naturally reject all of it in favour of what you already want to believe. I get that. You'll dig in.

Why do it anyway?

You're already dug in hard, so there's no real making it worse, so no additional harm done, I hope.

So I do it for the examples.

You've presented a couple of great examples here of how people take data and modify it and reframe it into lies for political purposes. It's exactly the same way the American fundamentalist evangelical movement has been doing it since at least the 1980s and 1990s, when I was studying it up close and personal.

Delete context, change context, move numbers from one context to another context and ding! you have "numbers" showing exactly the opposite of what those numbers actually meant, and that's one of the ways disinformation traditionally works.

An example from back in the day: Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye used to quote "a San Francisco homosexual newspaper" called "Bay Windows" saying that "pedophilia is the foundation of homosexuality" as part of a pro-pedophilia editorial stance. It was part of the standard fundamentalist propaganda arguing that all queers were child-molesting faggots who couldn't reproduce so wanted to rape children, turn them gay, and give them AIDS.

She'd quote extensively, and eventually turned out that the quotes were reasonably accurate. But the lie was one of context.

In reality, Bay Windows was quoting NAMBLA literature in an editorial condemning NAMBLA and their attempts to integrate themselves into pride parades.

By removing and lying about the context - an editorial condemning NAMBLA, et al - she could "quote" the "homosexual newspaper" as "endorsing child molestation," when the actual editorial she was quoting did exactly the opposite.

(It was also a Boston newspaper, not San Francisco. But San Francisco was scarier than Boston, so they changed the city.)

The techniques have not changed. Only the target.

So if anyone's made it down to the bottom of this long read, know this is one of the big ways disinformation works. Take the words and numbers, put them into the food processor and spin 'em around until they line up in the way you want, then attribute them back to the original writer as a quote. And these are a couple of examples.

Mind you, it also works by just straight up lying.

But if you think about it, straight-up lies aren't as bad. They're just lies.

This shit, though.

This shit straight-up corrodes truth. And that's... that's so much worse.