Evidence for Better Natural Immunity from the UK Data
Vaccine Surveillance Report Strikes Again
The Weekly Flu and COVID-19 Report for this week had a note saying that the Roche S and Roche N Antibody assay results were moved to the Weekly COVID-19 vaccine Surveillance Report and they have a new graphic in there now. The actually have antibody levels for the S Antibodies and they broke them down into charts of for those without N antibodies as well. That looks like this:
And if you also tested positive to N antibodies.
Visually the difference is striking, but take a moment to understand what it is saying. Obviously, we wouldn’t expect anyone without the vaccine who hasn’t been infected to have any S antibodies, so all that yellow in December through June even isn’t particularly surprising. And remember that the UK was running 8-12 weeks between doses, so the increase in high levels of antibodies until later in the year, especially for the younger age groups is also not surprising.
But look at the antibody levels on the lower chart and more importantly, look at how high they remain. Only the youngest age groups on the N Negative chart even hit significant numbers of 10000+ levels where ALL age groups on the N+ chart hit them. And notice the 1000-<2500 level? It is high across the board through time here with fading only in the oldest groups and only in the last couple of months. Compare that to the chart above and you can see that in terms of S antibody titers, it’s hard to compare the two. We would EXPECT the lower group to do significantly better when presented with COVID-19.
I would LOVE to get a hold of this raw data, so if anyone can find the data tables used for this graphic, please let me know. It would almost certainly let us estimate the number of previously infected who were also vaccinated. You can see that the antibody spike in the N+ chart matches the spike in the N- chart which must be vaccinations. Each off by 1 month, which I haven’t checked, but would bet is when the UK started allowing broad vaccination in each age group (earlier was likely frontline workers and the vulnerable).
But this data shows pretty clearly that vaccinated immunity alone is no match for natural immunity and we should expect worse performance, especially over time.
This is pretty definitive!