WaPo reporter’s citation used fraudulent appeal to authority to make anti-vax “natural herd immunity” claim.
The Washington Post no “candle in the dark” here.
A WaPo article1 regurgitated the covid contrarian Great Barrington Declaration style claim of “protection” by “herd immunity by natural infection”2 by saying “because of prior infection OR vaccination” and then tried to back up this claim of immunity by natural infection only, by linking to a CDC document from last year3 which does NOT claim there's a benefit of natural immunity from infection. There is no mention in the linked CDC page of any such claim that natural herd immunity from infection alone can be gained, or that infection alone is protective for the individual. (That would be an anti-vax claim.)
CDC officials acknowledged in internal discussions and in a briefing last week with state health officials how much the covid-19 landscape has changed since the virus emerged four years ago, killing nearly 1.2 million people in the United States and shuttering businesses and schools. The new reality — with most people having developed a level of immunity to the virus because of prior infection or vaccination — warrants a shift to a more practical approach, experts and health officials say.
“because of prior infection OR vaccination”
This is a perfect example of Fraudulent Appeal to Authority - using a citation that is meant to give the impression there’s evidence or support for a claim, but once examined, the linked material doesn’t support the claim.4 This is a scammy trick mostly used by wellness influencers using pseudoscience to peddle dubious products. It’s from the “snake oil sales” repertoire. Where are the fact checkers at The Washington Post? Where is the light?
The linked CDC report was about a survey of only blood donors specifically - a very specific group of people that excludes many, such as all gay men up until very recently.5 The linked report states that a lot of the blood donors at the time of the study collection had antibodies from EITHER recent infection OR vaccination, OR both vaccination and prior infection.
By the third quarter of 2022, an estimated 96.4% of persons aged ≥16 years in a longitudinal blood donor cohort had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, including 22.6% from infection alone and 26.1% from vaccination alone; 47.7% had hybrid immunity. Hybrid immunity prevalence was lowest among adults aged ≥65 years.
It did NOT claim that any of that imbued any of them, or their communities, with a specific benefit because that’s not a scientific claim the study could make. The study does not report a follow up with people to find out if they got infected or how many more times they got covid after the study, the study wasn’t about that, it was NOT tracking people having protection going forward from natural infection or the effects on their communities, and for all we know some of these people died with their next infection or from post-covid complications. We just don’t know. We have no idea because the study wasn’t about “protection” from infection, it was about the presence of antibodies.
The CDC linked report does NOT say that most people have developed immunity to the virus from prior infection OR vaccination. The CDC report remarks that somewhere else it has “been reported” that people were found less likely to be infected if they’ve been BOTH vaccinated and recently infected. And less than half of the blood donors in that study even had “hybrid immunity” markers - (meaning antibodies indicating vaccination and recent infection in the same person). The WaPo article was wrongly implying the idea that being infected without vaccination was the equivalent of vaccination, and that’s just not true. Even beyond the fact that not being infected is obviously preferable because unvaccinated infections come with considerably more risks,6 and infection generated response has been shown to be at best not good or no better, or inferior to vaccination response.7
The WaPo article giving the impression that the CDC is claiming (wrongly) that natural infection alone is an equivalent to getting vaccinated, is inaccurate. It’s also a typical claim of targeted anti-vax propaganda, relying on “appeal to nature” beliefs.8 And it’s dangerous because if people believe the CDC is making these anti-vax claims, it may in fact contribute to depressing vaccine uptake further.
So The Washington Post basically just trafficked in anti-vax PR peddling.
Journalists just keep using that word, improperly, and not explaining the term.
Health reporters really ought to explain the term immunity in a scientific context to the general public, instead of leaning into the misunderstandings and the inevitable misinformation that stems from the misunderstandings. And serious journalists and public health spokespeople should certainly NOT be going along with helping deliberate disinformation9 campaigns.
There is a widespread misunderstanding about what “immunity” means, with many in the general public understandably assuming it means that if a person has immunity that person is good to go because they “can’t catch that” when that just isn’t exactly how it works. The CDC report is NOT talking about the kind of “immunity” like legal immunity in court - a get out of infection free stamped card. Immunity in infectious disease science is a measurement of the presence of antibodies that indicate a prior infection, and depending on the virus, the person, and potentially other factors, that immunity may or may not help to mount a successful resistance when the person is exposed again.
“Your mileage may vary” should be the caveat whenever the term “immunity” is mentioned in a piece of public health information, according to the precautionary principle.10 A reporter talking about this issue is essentially imparting medical advice if they sound like they’re issuing guarantees on medical issues affecting individuals. There are no guarantees. And the only reason to want to keep this information from people is if it is desired that people have a false sense of security, and a false sense of reality for some reason. Obviously many doctors, reporters, and others, throughout history, have been recruited by industry interests or political interests, to coo and woo people, into a state of accepting the presence of negative effects.11 I call it manufacturing mild,12 and we’ve seen it from tobacco to climate change, and of course the pandemic.
We all know people who’ve been vaccinated and have had covid. Coronaviruses are notorious for evading prior immunity. Many of us feared because there was a distinct possibility that there would be no vaccines at all or at least not for quite some time.13 That we got any vaccines so quickly is really something. But the truth is there are no shortcuts. I sure hope there are more vaccines developed, but the fact is that even the best vaccines won’t tamp down the virus if people don’t actually get vaccinated in numbers. We have multiple vaccines that are now available and are evidenced to work to both reduce the risk of serious complications and also, especially within the first 4-6 months, to likely quell transmission to some extent. But our current state of vaccine uptake is simply awful. How could we possibly see a community effect when only 12% of the community has had the most recent updated vaccine? (Also, inconceivably, less than half of senior citizens have gotten the latest vaccine round.)14 On top of that, there’s reason to think that reinfection, no matter what, is just not a good dice roll to be doing, according to actual Long Covid researchers like Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly.15 All of this is why we need NPIs to support the vaccines according to evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace,16 and a proper vaccine campaign - like we’ve accomplished before - with polio!17
So I don’t know why they keep trying to sell us on this natural herd immunity "infection prevents infection” circular hopium, because we all can see that doesn’t make any sense. And just accepting exposure and all the fallout from it was already the thoroughly discredited and immoral plan of the Trump administration.18
And in fact the linked report by the CDC specifically states the implications for public health practice this way: “Low prevalence of infection-induced and hybrid immunity among older adults, who are at increased risk for severe disease if infected, reflects the success of public health infection prevention efforts” - meaning low rates of infection is a good thing and they are in fact praising public health infection prevention efforts, such as ISOLATION GUIDELINES, as A Good Thing, because prevention is a good thing. That’s the exact opposite of what the WaPo article was trying to do - using the CDC’s document lauding prevention as backing up… the end of prevention??
What’s so annoying about this fact check fail by WaPo is that it’s a one-two punch of a time sink trick. Fraudulent Appeal to Authority plays on the fact that most people won’t have time to click the reference link and verify it doesn’t actually back up the claim at all, but also has the added layer of effectiveness that even if people do check, and even if they know it’s fraudulent appeal to authority once they do look, most people, especially with an microphone or audience, won’t have the time and energy to point it out and explain it, because The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle19 makes it very time consuming to correct insidious errors and debunk misinformation like this. (I read this WaPo article the day it came out on February 13th.) And the damage is already done for so many who already read something that gave them dangerously wrong ideas, and will never know it.
Get vaccinated. Isolate when sick, and if you can’t stay home, wear a well fitting N95 or equivalent mask. Wear a mask in public places to protect yourself. The CDC’s actual scientific data doesn’t support any other recommendations, no matter who is eager to follow the politics or promote industry PR talking points.
We all deserve better than propaganda that obscures reality to the detriment of our safety.
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
References:
The Washington Post - CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines By Lena H. Sun February 13, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST CDC officials acknowledged in internal discussions and in a briefing last week with state health officials how much the covid-19 landscape has changed since the virus emerged four years ago, killing nearly 1.2 million people in the United States and shuttering businesses and schools. The new reality — with most people having developed a level of immunity to the virus because of prior infection or vaccination — warrants a shift to a more practical approach, experts and health officials say.
BMJ Opinion - Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt. September 13, 2021, David Gorski and Gavin Yamey This is not the first time billionaires aligned with industry have provided support to proponents of “herd immunity.” Gupta, along with Harvard University’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which, in essence, argues that covid-19 should be allowed to spread unchecked through the young and healthy, while keeping those at high risk safe through “focused protection,” which is never clearly defined. This declaration arose out of a conference hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), and has been heavily promoted by the AIER, a libertarian, climate-denialist, free market think tank that receives “a large bulk of its funding from its own investment activities, not least in fossil fuels, energy utilities, tobacco, technology and consumer goods.”
CDC - Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) - Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence and Incidence of Primary SARS-CoV-2 Infections Among Blood Donors, by COVID-19 Vaccination Status — United States, April 2021–September 2022 Weekly / June 2, 2023 / 72(22);601–605 By the third quarter of 2022, an estimated 96.4% of persons aged ≥16 years in a longitudinal blood donor cohort had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, including 22.6% from infection alone and 26.1% from vaccination alone; 47.7% had hybrid immunity. Hybrid immunity prevalence was lowest among adults aged ≥65 years.
Fraudulent Appeal to Authority. The tactic of citing sources that don’t actually back up a claim. This ploy utilizes the halo effect, anchoring bias, the mere exposure effect, autopilot thinking, and informational learned helplessness. And it’s fraud. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 9, 2024 Pseudoscience wellness grifters selling unproven remedies often use this tactic. They post a claim, and then they link to a scientific study to give the impression that it backs up their claim but that, once examined, by no means supports the claim, in fact it often refutes their claim, or is just not even a study of what they’re claiming. But since often nobody examines the linked material at all, never mind closely, and many don’t know how to examine and consider scientific studies, the liars get away with it.
Under new FDA rules, a gay blood center employee donated for the first time. Thanks to new federal guidelines finalized in May, gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships can now donate at many blood centers around the country. Dec. 22, 2023, 9:52 AM EST / Source: The Associated Press Over the last six years, blood center employee Dylan Smith was often asked how frequently he gave blood himself. His answer was always the same: As a gay man, he couldn’t. That changed this month. Thanks to new federal guidelines finalized in May, gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships can now donate at many blood centers around the country without abstaining from sex. Bloodworks Northwest, where Smith works as a donor services supervisor, adopted the change on Dec. 6. He and his partner gave blood for the first time the next day. “It’s been really emotionally difficult just to explain every single time the reason why,” said Smith, 28. “To be able to finally step up and support the mission that I really have just believed in since I started here just makes my heart feel so happy.” The new U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines are the latest step in a yearslong effort to reverse restrictions that were designed to protect the blood supply from HIV, but which were increasingly criticized as discriminatory following scientific advances that allowed better detection of the virus.
What people with heart disease should know about vaccines today By Michael Merschel, American Heart Association News Published: October 6, 2023 A research letter published in February in JACC found that among more than 1.9 million people infected with the coronavirus, vaccination was associated with a lower risk of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events. Flu vaccination, meanwhile, is associated with a lower risk of stroke. In an analysis published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in 2021, flu vaccination also was associated with an 18% lower chance of death from cardiovascular problems and a 25% lower chance of death from any cause.
Samanovic MI, Oom AL, Cornelius AR, Gray-Gaillard SL, Karmacharya T, Tuen M, Wilson JP, Tasissa MF, Goins S, Herati RS, Mulligan MJ. Vaccine-Acquired SARS-CoV-2 Immunity versus Infection-Acquired Immunity: A Comparison of Three COVID-19 Vaccines. Vaccines (Basel). 2022 Dec 15;10(12):2152. doi: 10.3390/vaccines10122152. PMID: 36560562; PMCID: PMC9782527. Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2, Moderna mRNA-1273, and Janssen Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccines generate similar humoral and cellular immune responses 4 months post-vaccination. All three vaccines elicit a stronger response than natural infection. However, previous infection or vaccination with all three vaccines failed to generate a robust and broad neutralizing response against delta and omicron SARS-CoV-2 variants. The similarity of immune responses from the three vaccines studied here is an important finding in maximizing global protection as vaccination campaigns continue.
Žeželj I, Petrović M, Ivanović A, Kurčubić P. I trust my immunity more than your vaccines: "Appeal to nature" bias strongly predicts questionable health behaviors in the COVID-19 pandemic. PLoS One. 2023 Feb 22;18(2):e0279122. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279122. PMID: 36812237; PMCID: PMC9946228. First, the appeal to nature bias had the strongest correlation to both vaccination status and the use of pseudoscientific practices. The youngest participants who were most prone to appeal to nature were also the ones least vaccinated. Second, trust in science both directly and indirectly predicted the vaccination status, corroborating recent findings [50], whilst trust in the wisdom of the common man did so only indirectly. As for their relation to the use of pseudoscientific practices to protect oneself from COVID-19, it was fully mediated by conspiratorial beliefs and the appeal to nature bias. This might be due to the fact that trust in science is a better-defined construct and has more content overlap with vaccination status. Even though it was widely used in public discourse, the term “wisdom of the common man” is more vague, and can encompass different areas of knowledge. We also found no significant correlation between trust in science and trust in the wisdom of the common man, implying that relying on folk wisdom does not necessarily lead to the devaluation of experts and science and that it cannot be equated to anti-intellectualism. The idea of their potential coexistence has already been raised in the literature [51]: the two types of knowledge were assumed to be drawn upon separately or even simultaneously, depending on the situation. Our results also revealed a more nuanced relation between the two types of questionable health practices. They were not negatively related as we expected, but unrelated. In addition, while the use of pseudoscientific practices was related to trust in the wisdom of the common man, it was not related to trust in science. Finally, taken together, our models were better at predicting non-adhering to recommended health practices (vaccination) than predicting resorting to non-evidence-based practices.
The Cognitive Crucible - #142 BRIAN MURPHY ON FREEDOM/SECURITY TRADEOFF Brian Murphy describes the definition of DISINFORMATION as having the following aspects - a covert indirect source, intentionality that is destructive, and a political, military, or economic objective.
Sonia Boutillon, The Precautionary Principle: Development of an International Standard, 23 MICH. J. INT'L L. 429 (2002). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol23/iss2/7 Having its origin with the rise of environmentalism in Germany in the 1970s,2 the precautionary principle was exported to the United States in the 1980s before it became an element of the European Community's environmental policy in the 1990s.3 At the same time, the principle was incorporated into numerous international conventions and declarations, not limited to environmental law.4 Despite this thirty year history, defining the precautionary principle remains problematic (as will be further discussed), with the Rio Declaration providing the most commonly stated definition: "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."5 As this definition indicates, although significant scientific advances have been made, science is, as yet, incapable of addressing ever-growing global threats to human health and the environment. The precautionary principle is intended to take into account these limits of science in addressing grave or irreversible risks. More importantly, however, it addresses the temptation for decision makers to rely on scientific expertise in order to avoid taking responsibility for their policies, requiring experts to recognize the imperfection of their science and placing the burden on policymakers to decide what level of risk is acceptable. The precautionary principle applies when (1) a situation (use of a substance, or behavior, for example) exists, (2) which may threaten the environment or human health in a grave or irreversible way, and (3) there is a serious risk that the threat will materialize. Implicit in this setting is the scientific uncertainty about the nature and extent of the threat, or uncertainty as to the realization of the risk into a major harm.
Rand Waltzman on Linkedin: Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (6) - Appeal to Mass Media, - Appeal to journalistic balance - Develop relationships with media personnel - Prepare information for media personnel - Invoke the Fairness Doctrine, Take Advantage of Target's Lack of Money / Influence - Silence or abuse individuals by - out-spending - exploiting a power imbalance, Normalize Negative Outcomes - Normalize the presence of negative effects - Reduce importance - Make them seem inevitable
The Guardian - Why we might not get a coronavirus vaccine Politicians have become more cautious about immunisation prospects. They are right to be - Ian Sample - Fri 22 May 2020 11.23 BST The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. Scientists have worked on coronavirus vaccines before, so are not starting from scratch. Two coronaviruses have caused lethal outbreaks before, namely Sars and Mers, and vaccine research went ahead for both. But none have been licensed, partly because Sars fizzled out and Mers is regional to the Middle East. The lessons learned will help scientists create a vaccine for Sars-CoV-2, but there is still an awful lot to learn about the virus. A chief concern is that coronaviruses do not tend to trigger long-lasting immunity.
CDC - Respiratory Illness Vaccination Trends—Adults - Internet Archive Wayback Machine 23 Feb 2024 The percent of the population reporting receipt of the updated 2023-24 COVID-19 vaccine is 12.4% (95% confidence interval: 11.8-13.0) for children and 22.3% (21.7-22.9) for adults 18+, including 42.2% (40.6-43.8) among adults age 65+.
TIME - Is It Dangerous to Keep Getting COVID-19? - By Alice Park Updated: January 11, 2024 10:43 AM EST | Originally published: January 10, 2024 10:19 AM EST Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, studies Long COVID: a condition marked by health effects that linger after infection. “Reinfection remains consequential,” he says. In a paper published in Nature Medicine in 2022, he found that people who had gotten COVID-19 at least twice experienced higher rates of short- and long-term health effects, including heart, lung, and brain issues, compared to those who were only infected once. But why? Dr. Davey Smith, a virologist and head of infectious diseases at University of California San Diego, says that certain characteristics—such as older age—may make people more vulnerable to complications after repeat bouts.
Statement on FDA’s proposal for once a year COVID vaccination Published January 25, 2023 Public Comment by Rob Wallace, PhD, submitted to the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee regarding the future vaccination regimens addressing COVID-19. Constraining vaccination to once a year would only further handcuff a public health response already limited by an abandonment of nonpharmaceutical interventions. At the clinical level, vaccination alone offers better protection but no guarantee against reinfection and Long COVID. At the evolutionary level, models by Okamoto et al. show losing NPI likely selects for changes in SARS-2’s reproductive strategy and the emergence of vaccine-resistant strains. In short, prevention, keeping people from getting infected in the first place, remains a critical contribution to preserving vaccine effectiveness. In the other direction, reducing the degrees of freedom we have in the types and scheduling of vaccine production only compounds the public health damage dropping NPI campaigns such as mask mandates and contact tracing produces.
NPR Can't Help Falling In Love With A Vaccine: How Polio Campaign Beat Vaccine Hesitancy. May 3, 2021 By Susan Brink An army of volunteers for the March of Dimes, largely mothers, went door to door, distributing the latest information about polio and the effort to stop it; they also asked for donations. As little as a dime would help, they said. And the dimes and dollars poured in, Oshinsky says, handed to the volunteers, or inserted into cardboard displays at store checkout counters or placed in envelopes sent directly to the White House. Cases of polio may have peaked in the U.S. in 1952 with nearly 60,000 children infected. More than 3,000 died. (By comparison, roughly a year's worth of comparable statistics for the COVID-19 pandemic reveal more than 32 million reported cases in the U.S. so far and more than 573,000 deaths.) The years-long campaign of information and donations to the polio eradication effort made anxious Americans feel they were invested in a solution, Stewart says.
Medpage Today: Report Shows Trump Administration Embraced Herd Immunity via Mass Infection — The strategy likely contributed to many preventable deaths, report notes - by Jennifer Henderson, June 22, 2022 "Dr. Atlas's stated reasoning for his dismissal of masks -- that they were purportedly ineffective at mitigating transmission of the coronavirus -- appears inconsistent with his pandemic strategy, which was premised on allowing the virus to spread rapidly among lower-risk individuals to facilitate disease-acquired herd immunity," the subcommittee wrote. "Whatever his rationale, the anti-mask policy advocated by Dr. Atlas would have had -- and did have -- the same effect as the policies he advocated in connection with his open pursuit of a herd immunity strategy: enabling the virus to infect and kill many more Americans.
Williamson, P. Take the time and effort to correct misinformation. Nature 540, 171 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/540171a Most researchers who have tried to engage online with ill-informed journalists or pseudoscientists will be familiar with Brandolini’s law (also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Is it really worth taking the time and effort to challenge, correct and clarify articles that claim to be about science but in most cases seem to represent a political ideology? I think it is. Challenging falsehoods and misrepresentation may not seem to have any immediate effect, but someone, somewhere, will hear or read our response. The target is not the peddler of nonsense, but those readers who have an open mind on scientific problems. A lie may be able to travel around the world before the truth has its shoes on, but an unchallenged untruth will never stop.
Thank you for explaining what immunity actually means. That's a helpful distinction.