Where will this all end? Now Caesar wants to control who is allowed to go to church and worship the LORD! According to BIG BROTHER New South Wales You MUST HAVE THE VACCINE or YOU are not allowed to go! What other encroachments into our faith will Caesar want?
‘Churches in New South Wales will be required to use a vaccination certificate system once 70 percent of the population have received at least two injections of the COVID vaccine.
From mid-October, churches will be permitted to return to in-person worship on the provision that they only host vaccinated-only services.
Once the target is reached, places of worship must deny entry to any member of the congregation who is not fully vaccinated.
Chris O’Keefe of 9News said the state government has not yet signed off on the roadmap, however, “this is the plan that is being worked on, and it’s likely to be signed off on this week.”
Ironically, the news comes just days after the author’s of the Ezekiel Declaration received a barrage of criticism from certain church leaders for “preemptively” and “prematurely” suggesting the state governments would require a vaccination passport system within the church.
The following is from an email received from the left leaning https://theconversation.com/au telling a BIG Porkie concerning coal and the climate scam! The writer of the article states ‘Coal has been back in the news this week in major ways.
First, a senior UN official urged Australia and other OECD members to quit coal by 2030, or see climate change wreak havoc on our economy and, inevitably, life as we know it.
Next, UK scientists today say Australia must leave 95% of coal in the ground to have any hope of stopping the planet warming beyond 1.5℃.
And yet, quietly in the background, the coal market reached a record high. If you’re anything like me, you may have seen this news and wanted to pull your hair out.
But in today’s lead story John Quiggin, an economist from the University of Queensland, reassures us that placing too much weight on the fluctuations of the coal market would be a mistake.
He explains Australia is perfectly capable of phasing out coal-fired electricity by 2030 and replacing it with a combination of solar and wind, backed by storage.
It’d be easy and relatively cheap to do, too. All we need is “a modest amount of political will”.’
Monica Smit began the https://www.reignitedemocracyaustralia.com.au/ and has been a thorn in the side for the Victorian State Government ever since. Well, the latest news of her incarceration by the Victorian Government is that it she ‘….appears to have made $50,000 a day sitting in a cell on remand after refusing to sign off on her own release on bail.
The 33-year-old from Pakenham has been charged with two counts of incitement and three counts of breaching the chief health officer’s directions.
She is alleged to have encouraged people to attend illegal protests held in Melbourne on August 11 and August 21 during Victoria’s sixth lockdown by authoring and transmitting posts on the encrypted Telegram app.
Monica Smit has been fundraising to help pay for legal costs. Picture: Mark Wilson
Shortly after Ms Smit refused to sign her release document, her partner Morgan Jonas – also an anti-lockdown activist and vocal critic of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews – launched a crowd fundraiser for her legal defence.
The crowd funding web page states that all money raised would be used to fight the charges.
‘A recent essay by Pete Shmigel on Flat White is a poignant reminder of how people who experienced tyranny behind the Iron Curtain have been among the first to fear the creeping authoritarianism of Western democracies in thrall to China’s brutal suppression of the Wuhan virus. Way back in the mists of time, I was living in New Delhi when Indira Gandhi declared a 21-month emergency in June 1975 to impose dictatorial rule. Overnight, the political and social atmosphere changed with a palpable sense of fear as political opponents were imprisoned and colleagues and neighbours turned into informants and snitches. My first academic article was on that experience. Two observations are worth recalling. We take freedom for granted but feel the sting of its absence when abruptly robbed of it. In a revealing statement, PM Gandhi said when the government had ‘allowed’ freedoms, but people had abused them, implying that liberties are in the gift of governments to dispense or withhold. I didn’t forsee that belief taking hold in almost all Western democracies within my lifetime, terrified by a disease of relatively moderate severity in the history of pandemics. Like frogs in water coming slowly to the boil, we have remained unconcerned as liberties were steadily stripped away and our attachment to freedom proved to be virus-thin.
The widespread proliferation of masks in public is part of the slow boil process. The pointlessness of the most common types of masks outside healthcare settings, unless you are unwell, is easy to show both on the science and visually with charts. The trajectory of infection curves is unaffected by imposing and lifting mask mandates: there is no visible inflection point on the slope to coincide with masks. ‘Don’t be selfish. For the sake of others, just mask up, it’s no big deal’, we’ve been admonished. Except their most potent result has been to normalise unquestioning and habitual obedience to diktats as citizens became subjects.
‘Grab a mask’ has been replaced with ‘get the jab’ as the metaphorical equivalent of the 100 degrees Celsius setting on the dial to bring the water to boil. Vaccines don’t stop infection and spread but reduce severe illness and death for the most vulnerable elderly group. According to 2021 data from Public Heath England, the unvaccinated over-50s are more than three times at higher risk of death from a Delta variant infection than the fully vaccinated. A recent Lancet study found vaccinated healthcare workers in a Vietnamese hospital were carrying 251 times the viral load in their nostrils as the unvaccinated. Dr Peter McCullough comments the vaccine transforms people into ‘presymptomatic superspreaders’. If – a big ‘if’ – this is replicated and confirmed, the vaccinated will pose the greater danger to others. Would digital certificates be used to keep them away from public spaces? Australian authorities haven’t bothered to justify vaccine apartheid despite similar transmissibility. Nor to explain what happens to those with naturally acquired immunity through infection that is both more effective and lasts longer.
Ross Clark reports on a new Israeli study which found that ‘double-jabbed, previously uninfected people are 13 times as likely to get Covid’ as unvaccinated people with natural immunity through infection. The bigger long-term danger of lockdowns is their ready public acceptability will empower every wannabe social engineer, power-hungry politician and control-freak bureaucrat to impose draconian controls for their favoured emergency du jour.
Also, like deer caught in Covid headlights, we ignore other grave health costs with accumulating undiagnosed and untreated illnesses. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics monthly update on mortality shows that until 31 May this year, 3,475 more Australians died than the five-year average in 2015–19. That’s forty times more excess deaths in the first five months than Covid deaths in eight months of 2021. The worst affected were cancer, diabetes and dementia. Lockdowns impair the capacity of the health system to treat illnesses in a timely manner, with heightened distress and anxiety from isolation and loneliness, increased fear of contracting the illness by going to the GP or hospital, cancelled screenings for illnesses that are treatable if caught early and deferred operations. Yet no government or chief health officer will be held accountable.
Hell, no one has even been subjected to aggressive questioning by reporters. There’s no daily solemn agonising by politicians and CHOs about the tragic toll, the unacceptability of just one preventable death and the determination to pursue zero excess death. James Allan is right to ask if journalists are lazy or dumb in not challenging the growing gulf around the world between official claims and contrary data. Hysteria, hypocrisy and selective morality reign supreme, with the PM and state premiers in office but the health bureaucrats and police commissioners in power. At about the same time as the myth of US exceptionalism was buried in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the myth of Australia’s Covid exceptionalism has been felled by the Delta variant. Scott Morrison has used new modelling from the Doherty Institute to outline a multi-phase roadmap with 70 and 80 per cent adult vaccinations as key milestones. Given the wildly inaccurate original Doherty modelling in March 2020, why exactly should we have confidence in the new model?
With 3,668 new infections recorded on 23 August, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Germany will stop using the infection rate as the metric for deciding if restrictions should be in force. They’ve been using 7-day thresholds of 35, 50 and 100 infections per 100,000 people to trigger openings and closures. Instead, Germany will monitor hospitalisations to assess if the health system is becoming overburdened. After two months of tightening restrictions and accelerated vaccine take-up, NSW’s daily ‘cases’ broke the 1,000 barrier on 26 August. Rather than accept lockdowns don’t work and vaccines are leaky, authorities blame insufficient public compliance with arbitrary and draconian but not always scientifically justified regulations. Who knew that watching sunsets should come with a compulsory health warning? Against all overseas experience, CHO Kerry Chant insists that vaccinating 16-39 year olds will ‘break the transmission chain’. Meanwhile Canberra recorded nine new Covid cases on 25 August, taking its total of active cases to 176 from 1 when the lockdowns were first brought in.
Today at 11am I was watching Sky as the New South Wales Premier gave her daily scare talk on the Wuhan flu vaccines and there was a news report given across the bottom of the screen announcing that Australia would have a Covid Passport in a couple of weeks. This is Hitler’s Germany!
‘Alongside skyrocketing new “cases,” infections and hospitalizations among the fully-vaccinated, Israel has announced it’s going to start pushing a fourth covid shot, which it claims will accomplish what the third shot — and the first two shots — could never achieve: the eradication of covid.
This is, of course, the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. How compliant, exactly, will the Israeli people be, given that their ancestors were once marched into Zyklon B death camps under nearly the same demanded obedience to authority? The vaccine holocaust is somehow fully embraced by about 80% of Israelis, none of whom seem to realize they are exterminating themselves under a globalist depopulation agenda. (This is called “auto-antisemitism,” by the way.)
But Israel isn’t the only nation declaring a never-ending pandemic. In Australia, now home to the most outrageous medical dictatorship on the planet, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews seems to have declared that unvaccinated people will be denied access to hospitals, doctors and health care services altogether. In his view, those who don’t take the vaccine should be cut off from civilization and denied everything, including groceries, health care services and presumably all forms of transportation.
In the USA, bioweapons mastermind Anthony Fauci is also pushing the idea of endless booster shots, perhaps requiring shots every five or six months.
Those world citizens who were gullible enough to go along with the initial requirement of taking two shots to be “fully vaccinated” are now finding themselves caught in a vaccine trap from which there is no escape. With each booster shot weakening their immune response, the consequences of obedience increasingly look like suicide. And the most obedient vaccine takers are setting themselves up for a high risk of death from future variants or outbreaks… which seems to be the whole point in all this.
Unless the people of the world peacefully rise up and reject the authoritarian nonsense, they will be subjected to a never-ending medical police state under the guise of a plandemic that perpetuates itself as fully-vaccinated individuals produce and shed highly infectious viral variants that keep killing people. As you might suspect, all blame will be placed on the unvaccinated, who are the scapegoats for this global depopulation biological weapons deployment.’https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-09-07-infinite-pandemic-multiple-nations-announce-never-ending-booster-shots-lockdowns-covid-compliance.html
The Australian Greens Party is a far left Marxist party as most if not all Green Parties are. The sad part of all this is that most of the major Australian political parties are going along with many of the Greens’ issues. The non-use of Ivermectin is just one of those issues!
‘The fight for press freedom continues with Sky News Australia subjected to hours of questioning regarding its editorial choices.
Sky News Australia Chief Executive Paul Whittaker opened the Senate Inquiry into Media Diversity by rubbishing accusations that the network deliberately peddled Covid conspiracy theories. Whittaker called the assertion, ‘frankly ridiculous!’
The inquiry was put together by a Greens MP from the far-left minor party that routinely criticises Sky New Australia’s centre-right position. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young chaired the inquiry accompanied by Labor Senator Kim Carr.
Senator Hanson-Young’s topic of the day was ‘Covid-Lies’, an idea that she repeatedly used interchangeably with unresolved political subjects that remain the topic of global debate.
The inquiry unfolded in a politicised atmosphere set up by Sarah Hanson-Young, whose personal website features a ‘take action’ talking point devoted to attacking Murdoch media.
‘In an embarrassing move, Senator Hanson-Young blocked Rebel News journalists Alexandra Marshall and Avi Yemini from covering the inquiry online – apparently violating her devotion to media diversity.
Senator Hanson-Young’s specific complaint about Sky News Australia revolved around it being ‘allowed’ to discuss Ivermectin on-air as a potential treatment for Covid.
After failing to correctly pronounce Ivermectin repeatedly throughout her questions, the Senator eventually resorted to calling it ‘horse wormer’.
“Do you accept that Sky News has created and published content that is either directly or indirectly promoted disinformation about Covid and Covid-Lies in relation to restrictions, health measures, cures?” asked Hanson-Young.
Sky News Australia replied to the entire day’s questioning with an official statement.
“We operate within the same legal framework as all media and are subject to both the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice and the Subscription Broadcast Television Codes of Practice.
“There is no evidence that Sky News breaches existing regulations or that the current regulatory framework is failing, or that further regulatory intervention is required.
“Indeed, it should be noted we have not been found in breach of the Codes of Practice for more than ten years.”
As a major news network, Sky News Australia maintains that it involves a wide range of discussion involving scientists, epidemiologists, GPs, pharmacists, researchers, chief health officers, politicians, doctors, and bureaucrats.
“But it now appears commonplace to discredit any debate on contentious issues as ‘misinformation’.
“So, the question becomes, why does a tech giant, YouTube, and faceless, nameless individuals backed by an algorithm, based in California, get to decide that holding governments and decision makers to account is ‘misinformation’? Why do they get to decide what is and isn’t allowed to be news?” added the official statement.
Despite insisting that Sky News Australia must only publish Covid information approved by the prime minister, state premiers, and the World Health Organisation – Senator Hanson-Young’s comments about Ivermectin proved inaccurate against the facts.
Its entry into the Covid conversation was heavily politicised by the American election. Ivermectin remains the subject of peer-reviewed studies, ongoing trials, and experimental use around the world – none of which involve horse paste.
Australia’s own Monash University in alliance with the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity proved that Ivermectin could kill Covid within 48 hours under laboratory conditions.
Globally speaking, the discussion on Ivermectin is far from over, with its off-label use against Covid widespread in Africa and South America. Public health experts, medical scientists, and South African health practitioners have banded together in a campaign to achieve formal approval for its use. There are similar stories in the Philippines and Latin America.
Senator Young’s main reasoning for wanting all discussion of Ivermectin banned was because it conflicted with official advice from the Therapeutic Goods Administration. It is difficult to find an example of this method being used to censor discussion on a media broadcaster.
Hospital admissions and injures associated with Ivermectin come from people consuming non-human approved animal treatments not the Ivermectin discussed in the studies. One could argue that governments banning the distribution of Ivermectin are the real cause behind these accidents.
Considering the ‘Ivermectin topic’ is central to both YouTube’s strikes and the Senator’s desire for stricter government regulation over the content of media broadcasters, it’s essential that this narrative is examined.
Ivermectin was not the only glaring inaccuracy brandished by those accusing Sky News Australia of misleading the public.
Labor Senator Kim Carr questioned Whittaker over a petition asking for a Royal Commission into media diversity.
This turned out to be ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s e-petition of ‘over half a million signatures’. The petition was earlier revealed to be riddled with computer-generated signatures and fake names, accounting to Sky News host Sharri Markson’s earlier investigation.
“Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has used this petition to launch a media inquiry into two ASX-listed companies; News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment, to have a whole Senate inquiry into the media industry, so this petition is being used as the basis for policy formation,” explained Sharri Markson.
The fake names on Rudd’s petition included ‘this sucks’, ‘Nacho cheese’, and ‘Jesus Christ’ which were generated by off-shore bot accounts.
The inaccuracy of the petition and its subsequent failure to trigger a Royal Commission was not mentioned at the inquiry.
The Inquiry into Media Diversity played out like a witch trial against Sky News Australia specifically.
Several Sky News Australia hosts declined to partake.
“There’s only one reason why I didn’t appear at today’s Senate hearing. I will not be party to a witch hunt, nor waste my time in the services of satisfying the paranoid fantasies of a failed former PM. The Senate Committee on Media Diversity came about as a result of a petition organised by former PM Kevin Rudd,” said Rita Panahi on Alan Jones.
Anti-Murdoch voices have waged campaigns to cancel the network for many years – including the use of anonymous online trolls to harass advertisers.
The situation did not become serious until YouTube issued a strike against the digital arm of the media empire in July of 2021.
YouTube is a commercial earner for Sky News Australia with almost two million subscribers. Three strikes in 90 days results in an immediate and permanent suspension of the account, regardless of size.
Sky News Australia was forced to remove twenty-three videos that allegedly violated YouTube’s policy on Covid misinformation. The videos included content up to a year old.
“Specifically, we don’t allow content that denies the existence of COVID-19 or that encourages people to use Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus. We do allow for videos that have sufficient countervailing context, which the violative videos did not provide,” said a statement from YouTube.
The majority of the content in question fell under the banner of ‘opinion’ rather than news, but YouTube did not provide any further clarity for their strike.
To be clear, YouTube’s policies are not a statement of absolute fact, but a compliance order to keep the material on their platform consistent with the health guidance from various authorities – even if this information is contested or later shown to be false. Strikes are not removed if health information changes.
Sky News Australia Chief Executive Paul Whittaker pointed this inconsistency out to the inquiry. Whittaker also strongly rejected the claim that Sky News Australia promoted an anti-vaccination narrative.
“Sky News Australia strongly supports vaccination. Any claims to the contrary are false and a blatant attempt to discredit and harm our news service,” said Whittaker.
When Lucinda Longcroft, Director of Public Policy, Google Australia and New Zealand was asked to provide examples of left-wing content removed by YouTube, she took the question on notice.
“Our Covid-19 misinformation policies are applied equally to all YouTube content and channel owners,” said Longcroft, but did not offer any data to prove the point.
It is a widely held opinion that YouTube applies its community standards unequally to users, with many conservative accounts taken down while fringe accounts – such as domestic terror group Antifa – remain up.
“YouTube’s actions make clear that it is not a neutral platform, but a publisher selectively broadcasting content and censoring certain views, while allowing videos that are patently false, misogynistic, and racist to proliferate. […] With no transparency provided, Sky News took the proactive approach of removing a batch of videos, all published during 2020, from online platforms to ensure ongoing compliance with YouTube’s arbitrary editorial guidelines,” Mr Whittaker added.
Social Media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become significant tools for political parties during election campaigns. As such, there is growing concern of foreign interference in Australian politics by these entities, especially when they brazenly remove elected members of parliament like Craig Kelly.
Platforms exist in a special legal limbo, where they are immune from prosecution regarding the third-party content they host on the proviso they refrain from engaging in publishing privileges. Under American Law, they are distinct from publishers and yet in the last few years they have made headlines for selective political censorship.
Whittaker insisted that the videos taken down by YouTube had no public complaints – which begs the question why they were flagged in the first place. He wrote to Google’s CEO in the hope of clarification, but received nothing in return, not even an acknowledgement of the query.
Australia’s media landscape has taken a bizarre path to this inquiry.
Chief among those leading the anti-Murdoch charge are full-time campaigner ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and occasional contributor ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. While the men come from opposing sides of politics, they share a history of unkind headlines enjoyed by readers at their expense.
The inquiry soon expanded to criticism regarding Sky News Australia allowing alternative discussion on Climate Change before accusing some of its hosts of racism.
This was swiftly followed by Hanson-Young asking Whittaker how many of his staff were female before elaborating that they were ‘rather young’. Her point was to suggest a power imbalance between young female producers and the more experienced network hosts.
Implying that young women are not capable of doing their jobs because of their age and gender is considered a sexist remark by most people. Whittaker was similarly bewildered by Hanson-Young’s line of questioning, pointing out that there is plenty of support for producers to do their jobs.
Inquiries are normally launched from an impartial basis so that the search for truth can be conducted without prejudice.
Even the Left leaning THE CONVERSATION carried an article concerning the new law here in Australia, that seems to me, takes away even more of our freedoms and privacy. All this is occurring under a supposed CONSERVATIVE Federal government! Is this law truly meant to catch REAL criminals or is it to actually meant to spy on those citizens that may not swallow all the Kool Aid handed out by government? Personally, laws such as this only provides more reasons why many do not trust the government! With that said ‘A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security.
The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes.
What’s more, legal hacking by law enforcement may make it easier for criminal hackers to illegally access computer systems via the same vulnerabilities used by the government.
What’s in the law?
The bill introduces three new powers for law-enforcement agencies:
“data disruption warrants” allow authorities to “disrupt data” by copying, deleting or modifying data as they see fit
“network activity warrants” permit the collection of intelligence from devices or networks that are used, or likely to be used, by subject of the warrant
“account takeover warrants” let agencies take control of an online account (such as a social media account) to gather information for an investigation.
There is also an “emergency authorisation” procedure that allows these activities without a warrant under certain circumstances.
However, the new bill gives agencies unprecedented interception or “hacking” powers. It also allows “assistance orders”, which could require selected individuals to assist government hacking or face up to ten years in prison.
Why do police argue this bill is required?
According to the Department of Home Affairs, more and more criminal activity makes use of the “dark web” and “anonymising technologies”. Previous powers are not enough to keep up with these new technologies.
In our view, specific and targeted access to users’ information and activities may be needed to identify possible criminals or terrorists. In some cases, law enforcement agencies may need to modify, delete, copy or add content of users to prevent things like the distribution of child exploitation material. Lawful interception is key to protecting public and national security in the fight of global community against cybercrimes.
How does lawful data interception work?
“Lawful interception” is a network technology that allows electronic surveillance of communications, as authorised by judicial or administrative order. There are standards (which means regulations and rules) for telecommunication and internet service providers to achieve this, such as those recommended by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
Law-enforcement agencies may require service providers to hand over copies of communications data, decrypted data, or intercepted data without notifying users. Service providers may also have to make available analytical tools such as graphs or charts of target behaviours.
What are the privacy concerns?
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and others have also raised privacy concerns. The bill may impact third parties who are not suspected in the investigation of criminal activities. In particular, the bill can authorise access to third party computers, communication and data.
The Human Rights Law Centre argues the proposed broad powers can potentially compel any individual with relevant knowledge of the targeted computer or network to conduct hacking activities. In some cases this may clash with an individual’s right to freedom from self-incrimination.
Enabling law enforcement agencies to modify potential evidence in a criminal proceeding is also a major issue of concern. The detection and prevention of inappropriate data disruption will be a key issue.
The implementation of the new warrants needs to be in line with Privacy Act 1988 which was introduced to promote and protect the privacy of individuals and to regulate Australian government agencies and organisations. Where some agencies may have exemption against the Privacy Act, it is important to balance between public safety and privacy impacts.
What are the security issues and impacts?
The Identify and Disrupt Bill is a part of an extensive set of Australian digital surveillance laws, including the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (TOLA), and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 (the Mandatory Metadata Retention Scheme).
Under the Identify and Disrupt Bill, access can be gained to encrypted data which could be copied, deleted, modified, and analysed even before its relevance can be determined. This significantly compromises users’ privacy and digital rights.
Modern encryption can be very hard to crack, so hackers often exploit other vulnerabilities in a system to gain access to unencrypted data. Governments too are reportedly using these vulnerabilities for their own lawful hacking.
Specifically, they depend on “zero-day exploits”, which use software vulnerabilities that are unknown to software vendors or developers, to hack into a system. These vulnerabilities could be exploited for months or even years before they are patched.
A conflict of interest may arise if law enforcement agencies are using zero-day exploits for lawful hacking. To protect citizens, we would expect these agencies to report or disclose any software vulnerabilities they discover to the software manufacturers so the weakness can be patched.
However, they may instead choose not to report them and use the vulnerabilities for their own hacking. This puts users at risk, as any third party, including criminal organisations, could exploit these so-called zero day vulnerabilities.
It’s not an abstract concern. In 2016, the CIA’s secret stash of hacking tools itself was stolen and published, highlighting the risk of these activities. The Chinese government has claimed the CIA was hacking targets in China for more than a decade using these and similar tools.
Government use of hacking tools may result in worse cyber security overall. The warrant powers given to Australian law enforcement agencies may protect public safety and national interests, but they may also provide powerful means for adversaries to access government data.
This includes the data and online accounts of targeted individuals like state officials, which may significantly impact national security. This possibility needs to be considered in light of the passing of the new bill.
‘Natural immunity appears to confer longer lasting and stronger protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization from the Delta variant compared to Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose vaccine-induced immunity, according to a new Israeli preprint study.
In the largest real-world observational study comparing natural immunity gained through previous SARS-CoV-2 infection to vaccine-induced immunity afforded by the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, people who recovered from COVID were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms or be hospitalized.
The study, published Aug. 25 on medRxiv, was conducted in one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world using data from Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis, or about 26% of the population.
Researchers examined medical records of 673,676 Israelis 16 years and older — charting their infections, symptoms and hospitalizations between June 1 and Aug. 14, when the Delta variant predominated in Israel.
The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit, with Maccabi’s research and innovation arm, KSM, found in two analyses that people who had never been infected with SARS-CoV-2 but were vaccinated in January and February were six to 13 times more likely to experience breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to unvaccinated people who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Researchers noted increased risk was significant for asymptomatic disease as well.
“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the Delta variant,” the researchers said.
“It’s a textbook example of how natural immunity is really better than vaccination,” Charlotte Thålin, a physician and immunology researcher at Danderyd Hospital and the Karolinska Institute, told Science. “To my knowledge, it’s the first time [this] has really been shown in the context of COVID-19.”
In one analysis that assessed more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID was 27 times higher among the vaccinated and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher, Science reported.
“The differences are huge,” said Thålin, although she cautioned the numbers for infections and other events analyzed for the comparisons were small.
Scripps’s Eric Topol pointed out several limitations with the study, such as the inherent weakness of a retrospective analysis compared with a prospective study that regularly tests all participants as it tracks new infections, symptomatic infections, hospitalizations and deaths going forward in time.
Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University who researches the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, said the Israeli study confirms laboratory findings from a series of papers in Nature and Immunity by his group, and a study by colleague Dr. Paul Bieniasz –– whose team published a preprint earlier this month showing polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to future SARS-CoV-2 variants and may confer protection against future sarbecovirus pandemics.
Nussenzweig said his group published data showing people who recover from a SARS-CoV-2 infection continue to develop increasing numbers and types of coronavirus-targeting antibodies for up to 12 months.
By contrast, Nussenzweig said, twice-vaccinated people stop seeing increases “in the potency or breadth of the overall memory antibody compartment” a few months after their second dose.
A closer look at the data reveals public-health communication may be overstating the vaccine’s effect on transmission and understating the scale and risk of breakthrough infections, the Intelligencer reported.
“The message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist.
“If this was still Alpha, sure. But with Delta, plenty of people are getting sick,” said Mina. “Plenty of transmission is going on. And my personal opinion is that the whole notion of herd immunity from two vaccine shots is flying out the window very quickly with this new variant.”
“We’re seeing a lot more spread in vaccinated people,” Topol said in an interview with Intelligencer, who estimated the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic transmission had dropped from 90% to 60% for Delta. Later, he suggested it might have fallen to 50%.
On Aug. 25, a large preprint study published by the Mayo clinic suggested the efficacy against infection had fallen as far as 42%.
“The breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public officials have transmitted,” Topol said. “We have no good tracking. But every indicator I have suggests that there’s a lot more under the radar than is being told to the public so far, which is unfortunate.”
Topol explained:
“I think the problem we have is people — whether it’s the CDC or the people that are doing the briefings — their big concern is, they just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to punch any holes in the story about vaccines. But we can handle the truth. And that’s what we should be getting.”
Almost all calculations about the share of breakthrough cases have been made using year-to-date 2021 data, which include several months before mass vaccination began (when by definition vanishingly few breakthrough cases could have occurred) during which time the vast majority of the year’s total cases and deaths took place.
Two-thirds of 2021 cases and 80% of COVID deaths occurred before April 1, when only 15% of the country was fully vaccinated, which means calculating year-to-date ratios means possibly underestimating the prevalence of breakthrough cases by a factor of three and breakthrough deaths by a factor of five.
In addition, if the ratios are calculated using data sets that end before the Delta surge, that adds an additional distortion since both breakthrough cases and severe illness among the vaccinated appear to be significantly more common with this variant than with previous ones.
According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of Aug. 23, 11,050 fully vaccinated people with COVID breakthrough infection had been hospitalized or died.
Unfortunately, accurate and complete data on breakthrough cases is hard to assemble. That’s because the CDC announced on May 1 it was going to stop reporting all breakthrough cases, and instead report only cases occurring in those fully vaccinated that resulted in hospitalization or death.
States currently maintain their own databases on breakthrough cases with no consensus among the states on how breakthrough cases should be counted. In Michigan, between June 15 and July 30, 19.1% of COVID cases occurred in those who were fully vaccinated.
In Utah, 8% of new cases were breakthroughs in early June, but by late July, as Delta became more prevalent, 20% of COVID cases were breakthroughs, according to NBC News.
As The Defender reported Aug. 24, about 30% of the new COVID cases in Los Angeles are breakthrough cases. The number is up from 13% in July and 5% in April.
As of Aug. 17, more than 12,500 fully vaccinated Massachusetts residents had tested positive for COVID and an additional 18 had died, NBC Boston reported.
whatyareckon 