The Australian capital city Canberra in midwinter is often minus 1 to 5 degrees C in the morning. Australian homes can get very cold and with heating bills rocketing, things are defacto becoming like life in Berlin, which is in a pre-War energy crisis. No one labeled Canberra public halls as “warm spaces” and they definitely aren’t open at night (it’s the public service!), but crowds are arriving at libraries just to escape the cold.
The ACT Government are a Labor-Green alliance, and are proudly, exuberantly “100% Renewable”, but won’t dare cut the cord to the coal plants that keep the lights on, making the claims of being 100% renewable a form of 100% false advertising. Even the ABC admits that the ACT itself only generates 5% of its own power, and 80% of the energy coming to the ACT through the wires is from fossil fuels. They pay off some distant wind farms to balance the theoretical gigawatt-hour tallies, and sponge off the states around for cheaper backup and stability that the coal plants provide.
Public libraries in the National Capital are now considered, by staff and patrons alike, to be ‘community centres’ where people come to read, use the computers, charge their phones, and use the toilets. It’s where clients of the NDIS, escorted by carers, are brought and propped up in their wheelchairs in front of computers or seated in deep armchairs by the magazine stands. Some, abandoned by their carers, shout incoherently for attention. Newly arrived migrants – Somalis, Iraqis, Syrians – jostle for attention of the library staff, asking for translation assistance with various forms and declarations.
Our libraries, warm and welcoming, have a crowd at their doors before the 10 am opening.
Groups of women discuss where they go to get warm:
One [woman] who recently ‘VR-ed’ (Voluntary Retired) still goes back to her old workplace, usually late morning, when the security guard who remembers her gives a nod and a smile as she settles into one of the comfortable settees in the reception area.
How sad is that — going back to her old workplace foyer just to stay warm?
A recent report showed woodfire heater smoke is the largest source of winter air pollution in Canberra. Currently, around 14 per cent of people in the ACT use a woodfire heater as their main source of heating.
So everyone “believes in climate change”, but they apparently don’t want to buy the fake-meat that is going to save us from storms, floods and droughts. It’s another mystery of post-modern life that’s solved by assuming that people say “Yes” to meaningless poll questions but “No thanks” to propaganda.
No one really believes their burger will stop cyclones in ninety years time.
McDonald’s announced that it has concluded the U.S. trial of its McPlant burger, which is made with the plant-based protein manufactured by Beyond Meat (BYND).
In November 2021, McDonald’s began testing the meat-free burger in eight restaurants across America. In February this year, the company introduced the McPlant burger at around 600 locations. According to third-party reports, the experiment ended as a failure. In a recent note, according to CNBC, JP Morgan analyst Ken Goldman cited employees from McDonald’s revealing that the burger did not sell well enough.
This is a complicated way of saying “nobody wants to buy our product”:
During the first-quarter earnings call in May, Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown explained that the company is finding it difficult to pass on rising costs to customers. “You see all these new entrants coming in, and many of them are using price as a way to try to capture early market share,” Brown said, according to the earnings call transcript published at The Motley Fool.
“And so while the animal protein industry has been able to substantially increase pricing to essentially offset significant reductions in volume, in our sector, we have not had the opportunity to do that.”
Meat costs were rising too, but customers were willing to pay.
I have nothing against fake meat (apart from shortages in iron, zinc and B12), but it’s become a culture war thing. The same people who want to profit from forcing it on us are often the ones telling us to panic about climate change, or selling us carbon credits, or coercing governments to restrict fertilizer. It’s the conflict of interest that stinks.
Bill Gates invested in Beyond Meat. Other investors include the usual suspects: Blackrock, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs etc. It’s bad news for them, the share price has fallen from $125 to $34 in the last twelve months. Ominously (for BYND shareholders) fully 34% of the shares are currently held by short sellers. So one third of the shares in existence are on loan to people who think the price will fall further, and who will sell them with glee if it does.
What were the marketing gurus thinking? The vegans who want to save the planet are not shopping at MacDonalds. The health zealots that want to avoid meat for health reasons won’t want to eat the bun, the mayo or the spray-on-margarine. For them it needs to be a McBurger-free-burger. Nothing about this makes sense.
Presumably the McBug Burger is coming soon. Cricket-burgers cool the climate?
For 2022 as a whole, we expect global coal demand to increase by 0.7% from 2021 to about 8 billion tonnes. This would match its all-time peak reached in 2013…
Worldwide coal consumption in 2021 rebounded by 5.8% to 7 947 million tonnes (Mt), according to our data, as the global economy recovered from the initial shock of the Covid pandemic and higher natural gas prices drove a shift towards coal-fired power generation.
Current coal price tonight: $407.90. Also almost a record. So we have highest volume at the highest price, and people want you to believe that no one wants coal.
China burns 53% of the world’s coal:
Coal demand in China, the world’s largest consumer by far, increased by 4.6%, or 185 Mt, in 2021, reaching an all-time high of 4 230 Mt.
India becomes the second country in the world to join the billion-ton-coal-club:
India consumed 1 053 Mt of coal in 2021, a new all-time high and the largest amount consumed in a single year by any country other than China.
One country in particular, isn’t trying to reduce coal by 2030:
So how high was that 2013 peak record? Strangely, the IEA doesn’t tell us, perhaps because it was just 8,002 Mt — which they thought then was a “historic high”. They even said that “global coal consumption will not return to its 2018 levels”.
In Hanover and Munich people won’t get hot water in museums, swimming pools, sports halls, and other public buildings. But hey, hospitals and schools will still have hot water. In Berlin, the lights around public buildings and monuments and the fountains will also be switched off. Germany is in a world of trouble, and the cut-backs are just starting, mid-summer, to avert the tragedy that will be winter, if Russia blocks all gas. Germans have cut gas by 5-6% in summer, but in a normal year they get between 30% and50% of their gas from Russia. All the talk of a 15% cut across the EU disguises that many of the other nations don’t want to do it, and Germany faces an extra difficult situation if they can’t get alternative gas supplies.
Cities in Germany are switching off spotlights on public monuments, turning off fountains, and imposing cold showers on municipal swimming pools and sports halls, as the country races to reduce its energy consumption in the face of a looming Russian gas crisis.
Hanover in north-west Germany on Wednesday became the first large city to announce energy-saving measures, including turning off hot water in the showers and bathrooms of city-run buildings and leisure centres.
GERMAN breweries have been told to stop the production of beer amid fears Oktoberfest will be cancelled after Russia cut off gas supplies. … It was axed in 2020 and 2021 for the pandemic.
Rosi Steinberger, a member of Bavaria’s regional parliament told the New York Times that the country’s Christmas markets could also be pulled.
And non-essential industries – including Bavaria’s breweries – could be forced to shut down in a bid to conserve energy amid rocketing gas prices.
Other European states are not happy about cutting gas to save Germany from its own energy mistakes, especially after the lectures during the financial crisis:
Habeck, of the [German] Green party, pointedly criticised the “strategic mistakes” of previous German governments and suggested his country could achieve “16 or 20%” of savings, depending on the severity of the coming winter.
The turning of tables in the bloc of European states has not gone unnoticed in German media. “Some states suffered heavily during the financial crisis and had to bear the lectures of the Germans,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “And now they are meant to massively save gas to bail out those same Germans, who have brought this situation on themselves with a misguided energy policy.”
Germany does not only need gas from Russia. BAFA showed that 34% of Germany’s crude oil came from Russia in 2021 and coal group VDKi said 53% of hard coal received by German power generators and steelmakers came from Russia last year.
*UPDATE: Twitter has halted the censorship after a flood of criticism, but not provided any explanation. It shows that speaking up works, but the incident still says a lot about Twitter, and whose side it’s on. They didn’t censor Chinese State media.
_________________
Since Twitter decided to block the upstanding, excellent Epoch Times, I feel therefore obliged to make sure that The Epoch Times gets more attention, not less. Tell your friends, spread the word. If Twitter deems an Epoch page Unsafe, you definitely want to go there. Just click through. Or go straight to The Epoch Times. Who needs Twitter?
We’re in an information war. We must know the enemy. Shore up lines of communication.
If you find yourself self-censoring your commentary for fear of being cut off, remind yourself that that’s exactly what they want. Ownership of your mind…
Twitter Targets American Media, Not Chinese State Media
The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 by Chinese Americans who fled communist China and sought to create an independent media outlet to bring uncensored and truthful information to the world.
For years the average wholesale price was somewhere between $30 and $60 per megawatt hour for electricity on the Australian national grid. But for the entire 2,184 hours of quarter two this year, we were paying an average price of $264 per megawatt hour. It wasn’t just due to a couple of freakish spikes, instead it was a relentless burning average, like a lava flow arrived at your wallet.
At an average operational demand of 22GW, that’s a hefty $12.7 billion dollar price tag for 91 days of electricity. Last year the same period it cost $4b. Years ago, before we added all the unreliable generators, it would have cost $2 billion.
It would have been cheaper just to build a whole new power plant last year.
The graph below covers the century so far. It is that bad.
It wasn’t that there was a particular time of the day when prices were higher, instead every hour was a bloodbath. It was a phase change. There was no happy hour at this hotel.
And it didn’t matter whether a state was renewable-heaven or a den of black-coal. Prices were shocking in every state, suggesting that adding more unreliables won’t save us, just like they didn’t save South Australia or Tasmania. The whole system together is failing. (Isn’t unity wonderful?)
The one thing we know, the only path back, is to a time when the system was more flexible and had more inner strength — more reliable energy, where it had enough spare capacity to shift dependence away from gas and black coal.
Not surprisingly, it was mayhem on the bridge last quarter. The AEMO forecast more than 400 separate lack of reserve warnings (called LOR’s) in the second quarter, compared with 36 in the March quarter and 73 a year earlier.
And the pain just kept growing. Every month worse than the one before. Almost like we used up the slack in the system in April, then there was nothing to fall back on. The gas stocks were drained, the transmission lines couldn’t be fixed fast enough, and even the rivers were full, so we couldn’t run the Hydro dam without flooding the fields downstream.
I’ll have more to say soon. But while many are blaming a string of things, the truth is, there is one over-riding factor that screwed the Australian grid, and it was when someone decided to use it to control the weather. If brown coal plants were still respected, we could have left some gas in the storage vaults and saved enough money to build two hotter, cleaner new brown coal plants.
*Headline changed from “spent” to “price signal” to reflect the complexities of the Spot market prices being delayed, smoothed and spread through forward and other contracts. Total cost corrected from $12.7b to 12.1b. (typo).
Normally in a prewar situation a country might be increasing industrial production
h/t Rafe Champion
Russia has cut gas supply again, arguing over the German paperwork, after Canada dithered on sending the last turbine back, and Poland reneged on some dividends. Everyone is playing poker with energy, even if some of them didn’t count their cards before they started — and gas is predictably, hitting new record prices. But even before the ante was upped in the latest round, 15% of German industry were already cutting production. Many others are planning to or were considering moving. People are starting to wonder if this might be a permanent loss for the famous German industrial power.
In other news, rather frantic landlords in Germany want to be able to legally restrict temperatures of their tenants units. Someone has got to pay that gas bill, and just asking tenants to take shorter showers doesn’t seem to be working.
Now they tell us:
“Gas is now not only part of Russia’s foreign policy, but possibly also part of the Russian war strategy,” said [Klaus Müller, the president of Germany’s Federal Network Agency, Bundesnetzagentur]
If only someone saw that coming, like say, in 2018, when Germany had plenty of time to make sure energy didn’t become a threat to national security and their industrial base?
With Nord Stream 1 flowing at just 20% of capacity from July 27, Germany will NOT have enough natural gas to make it throughout the whole winter **unless big demand reductions are implemented**. Berlin will need to activate stage 3 of its gas emergency program
“The European gas crisis continues to escalate. Gas prices have returned to levels only seen in March as Nord Stream flows dwindle, while the outlook for winter looks bleak for European consumers,” BCS GM said in a note.
German power for delivery next year, the benchmark European price, shot up to a record 388 euros ($394) per megawatt hour on Wednesday — more than 400% higher than a year earlier. It later pared its gains slightly.
Though those slaves to the Australian National Energy Market would say “is that all”. We’re already paying $400 a megawatt hour. We don’t have to wait til next year. And we’re exporting gas too.
And so it begins: According to the DIHK survey of 3,500 companies the energy intensive industries are suffering so much they have to move or shut down.
One of every six German industrial companies feels forced to reduce production due to high energy prices, a survey by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, DIHK, showed on Monday.
Nearly a quarter of the companies forced to reduce production have already done so, and another one-quarter are in the process of scaling back production due to sky-high energy prices, according to the survey of 3,500 companies from all sectors and regions in Germany.
The survey also showed that only half of Germany’s industrial companies have covered their annual 2022 gas requirements via contracts. More than a third of industrial firms still have to buy more than 30% of their annual gas needs.
Germany’s second largest private real estate group, LEG Immobilien, says “”I believe that in the current war situation, the population in Germany must be made aware that renunciation is now the order of the day,” CEO Lars von Lackum told the Handelsblatt.
Coming soon? Let’s “wear a ski-jacket to dinner” for your country?
If we measure the vibrancy of an economy by its energy use, the EU peaked in 2006 and is down 10%. The UK, alas has fallen even further and faster and is down 30%.
John Constable at the GWPF has produced a damning report on Europe’s Green Experiment and remarked that there hasn’t been a fall in energy this large “since the end of the late middle ages”.
Effectively, the EU paid €770 billion to export it’s carbon emissions and jobs to China and import nearly everything else.
The study shows that up until 2005 the EU’s energy consumption was on a rising trend, but it has now fallen by over 10% on the 2006 peak, and is now back at levels last seen in the 1990s. The UK is even more severely affected, with consumption falling by about 30% on its peak in the early 2000s and is now at levels last seen in the 1950s.
Further analysis reveals that electricity generation productivity has collapsed, with system load factor falling from an adequate 56% in 1990 to a worryingly inefficient and expensive 37% in 2020.
A trillion dollars in subsidies to renewables — mostly paid by the EU
It takes a lot of money to destroy a good industrial base, and the EU had the cash:
The EU’s commitment of subsidies to the renewable energy sector is nearly 70% of the total across major economies, as can be seen in Figure 9, which compares annual subsidies (including tax expenditures) in the EU27, Japan, the UK, the US, and China. Over the period covered in this figure, total subsidies to renewables, including tax expenditures, amounted to €893 billion, of which the EU was responsible for €612 billion.
Like the fall of Rome
As the cost of energy went up, the people of the EU started to buy things from places which could make them cheaper:
The EU’s own data shows that energy prices have been consistently above the non-EU G20 average, with household electricity prices for example being 80% higher and industrial electricity prices being 30% higher, a difference that is largely due to policy. Similar effects are found in relation to both natural gas and transport fuel prices.
Was this “peak EU”?
EU and American Solar Panel Production never recovered from the GFC
Just look at the exodus. All those subsidized jobs in solar panel production headed for China in 2009. Wow. Just wow.
European subsidies created lots of green jobs (in China)
And this is just employment in the renewables sector. It’s not showing all the jobs destroyed in the EU making hairdryers, cars, fridges, and everything else…
This is what Europe got for a trillion dollars
Europeans paid all that money but got less energy and made these dramatic changes to their energy sources (not).
The increase in actual power from wind and solar and biomass is marked with arrows.
China could afford to make solar panels because it wasn’t building them with solar power
Hapless consumers in the EU paid for expensive electrons to make them feel good, while they paid people in China to build the exact same things but with more coal than they would have if they had made them themselves.
All hail the clean green energy reset — where people are being warned to get ready to live in colder, darker houses, and big energy users will be offered money to stop work. Make plans to turn that factory off! Buy candles!
The UK sits on a giant gas storage site they could have tapped 10 years ago. Instead costs are up so much Ofgem has warned this could push around 12 million people into fuel poverty which is one in six people in Great Britain. The energy price cap is projected to hit around £3,200 (maximum annual tariff).
Back to the dark ages? Now millions of Britons could be told to switch off the lights and turn down the thermostat to avoid blackouts this winter under emergency plans
Daily Mail, 24 July 2022
Households might have to turn down their thermostats and switch off lights to avoid blockouts under emergency plans.
To avoid rolling blackouts in the UK, the National Grid could also pay some large energy users to use less power to ease the pressure on the grid.
…with the energy price cap tipped to soar to around £3,200 (maximum annual tariff) in October, industry regulator Ofgem has warned this could push around 12 million people into fuel poverty.
Those that frack, get cheap gas
Benny Peiser from NetZeroWatch said natural gas prices in Europe are ten times higher than in the US because Europe is not using its shale resources. Which leads me to this rather blistering graph by Wikideas1.
But the UK Business Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, says it won’t help if the UK develops some more gas wells. The UK has “no supply issues” — he declared in magical-economics — the energy crisis is just a “price issue”. Who needs to frack when you can have a focus group?
Meanwhile Greenpeace are doing everything they can to help Russia:
The eco campaign group claims Shell was wrongly granted a development licence for the Jackdaw field without proper environment checks last month, in defiance of the UK’s climate commitments. It has brought a legal challenge against the Government and is vowing to frustrate other schemes brought forward in the North Sea as well.
Director of Global Warming Policy Foundation Benny Peiser says Russian President Vladimir Putin has “colluded” with green movements to tighten energy markets in Europe.
A group of Polish lawmakers have presented Germany with a proposal to lease the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants, which, despite the energy crisis in Europe, the German government has maintained its commitment to shut down. “If the Germans do not want to use their nuclear energy themselves, they should lease it,” argued Polish MP Paulina Matysiak of the Lewica Razem (Left Together) party. — Kurt Zindulka, Breitbart
Poland wants to build its own nuclear plant but it won’t be finished til 2033.
The $64 billion question is why Germany wants to get to Net Zero the hard way?
Wokism is just another cycle of the bossy righteous social climber, and it will be defeated, not when we take them seriously, but when we laugh at them.
Nothing is funny any more, all jokes are microagressions. The world’s unctuous busybodies are humorless sods, telling everyone to eat bugs and arm themselves with solar-panel-shields to stop the tide. They pretend to care for the poor while they condemn them to poverty. They earn points in invisible beauty contests while they accidentally raze forests, kill bats, and slaughter birds in a quest to be holier than the guy next door. The only thing they care about is themselves.
Nick Cater reviews a new book by Noah Rothman that sounds like a good read. The point I appreciate the most is that humans have gone through these waves of righteous madness before and that there will be an end, and the more we mock them, the sooner it will come. As Nick Cater sublimely does with one performer at the Melbourne Comedy Festival who he describes as “.. an Indigenous woman who identifies as a comedian.”
From the Publisher: The New Puritans can judge a person’s moral character by their clothes, Netflix queue, fast food favorites, the sports they watch, and the company they keep. No choice is neutral, no sphere is private. Not since the Puritans has a political movement wanted so much power over your thoughts, hobbies, and preferences every minute of your day. In the process, they are sucking the joy out of life.
Welcome to the new age of puritanism where stand-up comedy has been replaced with performative piety. It doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to contribute to the fight against systemic evils and the creation of a less shameful society.
Like Hollywood directors, artists and athletes, comedians are no longer tasked with delivering enjoyment for its own sake. They must convey the correct moral and political message or risk being deplatformed.
The enthusiasts driving this culture of moral conformity have more in common with their 17th- and 18th-century puritan forebears than they care to imagine.
Not surprisingly, the requirement comedians be both earnest and funny is threatening to kill off the business altogether. In 2008, comedy movies accounted for 25 per cent of Hollywood box-office takings. Ten years later comedy was reduced to just 8 per cent. Comedy box-office receipts had more than halved even as overall revenue had grown larger.
These striking comparisons between puritans old and new are drawn in a new book by US conservative commentator Noah Rothman. Others have compared today’s progressive ideology to a fundamentalist new religion replete with dogma, liturgy and conformity with a narrative of sin and redemption. Rothman goes further, explaining earlier generations of puritans sought more than personal salvation. They were engaged on a utopian, messianic mission not dissimilar to the people we today consider as woke. Puritanism was more than a religious creed, “it was also a program for society” furthered by the good work of the righteous.
Whatever it is, it’s not about respect:
The new puritans bring their morality to bear on the food we eat. The production of meat and other animal products is causing global warming, they claim. The world must move to a vegan diet supplemented only by bugs, the only type of fauna considered to be acceptable for human consumption. The absence of meat is seen as a virtuous form of self-denial.
“Proponents of this sort of thing seem constitutionally incapable of arguing in favour of a bug-heavy diet because you might actually like it,” writes Rothman. “For the New Puritans, a smug sense of self-satisfaction is the most delicious dish of all.”
We can feel the witchhunts of cancel culture rising to new absurd heights, but there is a self-limiting nature to it. The more righteous they get, the more there is to laugh at. All we need are more people with the spine to laugh out loud.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
Shut Up, say Climate Alarmists trying to ban Fossil Fuel Ads
When science is not on your side you have to stop the other half speaking somehow. Obviously, these marketers are not going to win a science debate.
So 300 public relations geniuses who are dependent on fossil fuels want to deny the companies that feed, cloth, warm and move them — the right to even pay to make their case? Well, Over to you I say. When you switch off the grid, we’ll believe you are sincere, rather than status seeking junkies looking to earn fashionista points in a debate you haven’t done five minutes of real research in.
They, the physics dropouts of university, may protest that they have solar panels, and an EV, and timeshares in a windfarm near Ararat, but not one of them has the integrity to do this properly. All of them rely on power from coal plants in the dead of night to keep them warm, to stabilize the fifty hertz, and to be there when the wind don’t blow. Even in the unlikely event one of the 300 has bought the Super-Uber battery bank that charges their car and the fridge and has themselves disconnected from the grid, — who among them would also eschew flights, and feed themselves with food from farms run with windmills and horses? Or buy mobile phones built from metals mined only by hand or solar powered robots and smelted with sustainable forests? Oh, they protest, but that’s not fair?
What’s not fair are the 240 Volt hypocrites who claim fossil fuels are “like” tobacco while they enjoy the benefits of them every single day of their lives. They are trying to force their own expensive fashionable fantasies on the poor, but they don’t want the poor to hear other views. They resort to namecalling to smear those who provide them their essentials, so the poor don’t find out how stupid it is.
The truth is these marketing brains are scared Fossil fuel ads might make them look like selfish, unethical tyrants:
At least one climate advocacy group argues such marketing should be banned in Australia, in a move similar to the outlawing of tobacco advertising three decades ago.
Comms Declare, a group made up of 300 marketing, public relations, advertising and media professionals, as well as 80 organisations that have committed to not supporting companies contributing to the growth of fossil fuel emissions in Australia, has launched a campaign of its own calling for a tobacco-style blanket ban on advertising by coal, oil and gas companies in Australia.
“We founded in recognition that, famously, marketing and PR has been used for decades to help polluting companies,” Comms Declare chief executive Belinda Noble said. “We want that to stop.”
A second Australian household have been rushed to hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning after attempting to warm their house with a charcoal burner – laying bare the reality of the country’s ongoing energy crisis.
Emergency services attended a home in Adelaide‘s Bedford Park on Friday morning after four people woke up feeling faint and suffering from nosebleeds. They had been attempting to warm their home overnight using a cooker. All four showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning.
It comes after a family of six from Sydney’s west were also hospitalised this week after using a burner to warm their granny flat.
His father said it was a response to rising gas prices in Australia.
Twenty South Australians have been admitted to hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning caused by unventilated heating in the past year.
The MFS has revealed that as well as the latest case, two people were taken to hospital last week.
“We are seeing a spate of people bringing outdoor heaters into the home, and burning heat beads, charcoal, and wood in unventilated rooms,” he said. “It is a combination of a very cold winter and the higher cost of electricity and gas (causing people to do this).
How can this be? South Australia has all that clean renewable energy …
Natural immunity against Omicron from a previous Omicron infection is better than advertised (75%+) so far
Two new interesting studies out of Qatar in the last month show that natural immunity against Covid is better than recent headlines suggest, and also that (as expected) immunity created from a real infection lasts about three years whereas vaccine immunity may “last only one” (at best, and if that).*
Although people who caught early variants (up to Delta) are only 28% protected against catching the latest Omicron BA5, people who have caught some form of Omicron itself already may have 75 – 80% protection. And what really matters is that everyone who has caught any form of Covid has “robust” protection against severe disease.
Qatar is an interesting population to study — it has a youngish demographic and they can literally include everyone which removes a lot of selection biases. It’s a very diverse conglomerate: Nearly 90% of Qatar’s population are expatriates from over 150 countries, coming …because of employment.
The first study is one of the longest term research projects on Covid to date. Chemaitelly et al followed people who got Covid in Qatar from nearly the beginning of the whole pandemic. They estimate protection against reinfection starts off at 90% and gradually declines over the next couple of years, until it reaches nothing, they figure (with Gompertz curves), by about 32 months. The good news is that protection against severe infection appears to be robust, even when people do get infected again.
Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t some cumulative damage from reinfection (and other studies suggest there might be, which I’ll discuss soon), but at least the second infection itself probably won’t put people in hospital or a morgue. As far as decisions for boosters go, will doctors tell their patients about this data?
There was never any justification for forcing people to take vaccines if they already had natural immunity.
Only Omicron really protects against Omicron reinfection
The second study (Altarawneh et al) from a similar group of researchers, looked at the most recent data when the superinfectious BA5 variant was spreading rapidly in May and June this year. They estimate that immunity against old Covid infections (Delta and earlier) are not that useful in stopping these later two Omicron variants. People who caught Covid in 2020 and 2021 appear to have about a 28% protection against reinfection. But people who caught an early variant of Omicron are much better protected — with 75% – 80% protection against reinfection. Part of the weaker protection from catching an early variant of Covid is because the virus has changed shape so dramatically, and part of it is due to the waning of immunity. Obviously people who caught the original Wu-Flu are a long way past the infection.
This graph below is the past year of Covid variants globally. Obviously Omicron BA.5 is taking over. It was virtually unknown at the start of May but now is about 63% of global infections. Depending on which country you live in, you can check the Nextstrain database to see which strain was dominant at various times (like say, when you may have caught Covid, so you can figure out what the variant may have been). (Mouseover their graphs).
Natural immunity induced by infection with SARS-CoV-2 provides a strong shield against reinfection by a pre-Omicron variant for 16 months or longer, according to a study (Chemaitelly). This protection against catching the virus dwindles over time, but immunity triggered by previous infection also thwarts the development of severe COVID-19 symptoms — and this safeguard shows no signs of waning.
The study, which analyses cases in the entire population of Qatar, suggests that although the world will continue to be hit by waves of SARS-CoV-2 infection, future surges will not leave hospitals overcrowded with people with COVID-19.
Chemaitelly: The top line shows protection of early variants against other early variants. The lower line shows what happened when Omicron arrived. Presumably natural protection from Omicron against Omicron is similar to the top line.
Now they tell us…
Regardless of the extrapolations, the data indicate that naturally acquired immunity is hardy — something that is not always championed.
“In the US, we were underselling the immune protection provided by previous infection,” says Jeffrey Morris, a biomedical data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He adds that the Qatar team’s study affirms the substantial evidence for natural immunity’s capabilities.
The second paper looked specifically at Omicron protection against Omicron:
To see how much protection previous infection offers against the two Omicron subvariants, Abu-Raddad and colleagues analysed COVID-19 cases recorded in Qatar between 7 May this year — when BA.4 and BA.5 first entered the country — and 4 July. They looked at the number of people known to have been infected previously who tested positive or negative for COVID-19, and identified which infections were caused by BA.4 or BA.5 by examining positive test samples to see whether they contained a protein that these subvariants lack.
The researchers found that infection with a pre-Omicron variant prevented reinfection with BA.4 or BA.5 with an effectiveness of 28.3%, and prevented symptomatic reinfection with either subvariant with an effectiveness of 15.1%. Prior infection with Omicron granted stronger protection: it was 79.7% effective at preventing BA.4 and BA.5 reinfection and 76.1% effective at preventing symptomatic reinfection.
Effectiveness of a previous pre-Omicron infection against symptomatic BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was 15.1% (95% CI: -47.1-50.9%), and against any BA.4/BA.5 reinfection irrespective of symptoms was 28.3% (95% CI: 11.4-41.9%). Effectiveness of a previous Omicron infection against symptomatic BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was 76.1% (95% CI: 54.9-87.3%), and against any BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was 79.7% (95% CI: 74.3-83.9%).
The study was implemented on Qatar’s total population, perhaps thus minimizing the likelihood of bias.
*Natural immunity may last three times (or even five times) as long as vaccine induced immunity
Protection of natural infection waned with time after primary infection, prior to Omicron emergence, and reached ∼70% by the 16th month. This waning likely reflects genuine waning in biological immunity rather than viral immune evasion, as pre-Omicron variants demonstrated much less immune evasion than Omicron.14–16 This waning in natural immunity mirrors that of vaccine immunity,4, 6, 30 but at a slower rate.Vaccine immunity may last for only a year,4, 6, 30 but natural immunity, assuming Gompertz decay, may last for 3 years, as also suggested by long- term follow-up of SARS-CoV-1-associated antibodies,36 and incidentally not dissimilar to pandemic-influenza-associated antibodies.37
Immune evasion of Omicron subvariants reduced overall protection of pre-Omicron natural immunity and accelerated its waning (Figure 3), mirroring the effect of Omicron on vaccine immunity, but at a slower rate. Vaccine immunity against Omicron subvariants lasts for <6 months,5, 7, 8 but pre-Omicron natural immunity, assuming Gompertz decay, may last for just over a year.
Despite waning protection against reinfection, strikingly, there was no evidence for waning of protection against severe COVID-19 at reinfection.This remained ∼100%, even 14 months after the primary infection, with no appreciable effect for Omicron immune evasion in reducing it. — Chaimaitelly et al
Informed consent means knowing more about natural immunity as well as vaccines and the risks associated with them. Given the risks of vaccination, once people have had any variant of Covid, are there any benefits for “boosting”? These are questions doctors or bosses need to answer.
Altarawneh et al (2022) Protection of SARS-CoV-2 natural infection against reinfection with the Omicron BA.4 or BA.5 subvariants, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.11.22277448
Michlmayr et al (2022) Observed protection against SARS-CoV-2 reinfection following a primary infection: A Danish cohort study among unvaccinated using two years of nationwide PCR-test data, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2022.100452
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