Jan. 18, 2022 - Epoch Times
19:23
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| Good evening. | |
| According to this new study right here, which came out of Qatar and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it found that those people who have already suffered from COVID and therefore have natural immunity, they are very well protected against future infections. | |
| In fact, according to the study, it found that among the people who already had COVID, only 0.4% of them got it again. | |
| And among those reinfections, they were 99% mild cases. | |
| Meanwhile, in regards to the new variant of the virus that just came out of South Africa, it turns out that the reason it was called Omicron was in large part due to the fact that the WHO did not want to offend China. | |
| Otherwise, based on the Greek alphabet, it should have actually been called the Xi variant. | |
| And then lastly, according to the head of the South African Medical Association, who is, by the way, also one of the first doctors to actually discover this new variant, she said over the weekend that the symptoms that she's seeing are unusual, but actually, they are rather mild. | |
| Let's go through it all together. | |
| This is your daily Facts Matter update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times. | |
| And now let's begin today's discussion by talking about natural immunity. | |
| According to a recently published study which came out of the Kingdom of Qatar, people who have already recovered from COVID, meaning they already had a COVID infection, they have very little risk of contracting the disease again. | |
| Meaning that according to this study, an individual who has already suffered from COVID is at very little risk of becoming reinfected. | |
| Now, of course, if you've been following the story of natural immunity in regards to COVID for a little while now, then you likely already know this fact. | |
| Because in total, there have been over 100 studies across the entire globe, which support the claim that natural immunity very likely provides either similar or even superior protection compared to vaccines. | |
| However, what makes this study out of Qatar so special is the scope. | |
| Because Qatar is a relatively small country, it's also a kingdom, and therefore, the researchers in that nation, they were able to collect comprehensive data on almost everyone in the entire country. | |
| Here's, in fact, what the study said in regard to the scope of the research that they were able to do. | |
| Here's in fact what the study said in regard to the scope of the research that they were able to do. | |
| Quote, Using national federated databases that have captured all SARS-CoV-2 related data since the onset of the pandemic, we investigated the risk of severe disease leading to acute care hospitalization, critical disease leading to hospitalization in an intensive care unit, and fatal disease caused by reinfections as compared with primary infections in the national cohort of 353,326 and fatal disease caused by reinfections as compared with primary infections | |
| And so essentially, what these Qatari researchers were able to do is to use their national databases to examine the medical records of almost everyone in the entire country. | |
| And more specifically, there were 353,326 people in the country who had contracted COVID sometime between February 28, 2020 and April 28, 2021. | |
| meaning that sometime in this 14-month time period, these individuals had been infected. | |
| Then, what the researchers did is that they removed about 87,500 people from their study group, and they excluded them, because those people had gotten the vaccine. | |
| And the researchers, they wanted to only study the people who had exclusively natural immunity, not people who had natural immunity plus the vaccine. | |
| Then, they followed the records of the remaining people to see whether they became reinfected. | |
| And what they found was that natural immunity provided very strong protection. | |
| Specifically, out of the nearly 300,000 people, only 1,304 of them were reinfected, which is about 0.4%, meaning that only 0.4% of the people who had natural immunity and who never got the vaccine got reinfected with COVID. | |
| when they looked for severe cases, meaning cases of COVID that were so serious that people had to go to the hospital, the researchers only found four cases. | |
| Only four cases of reinfection that were determined to be severe. | |
| Meaning, that out of everybody in Qatar who had natural immunity and also never got the vaccine, there were only 1,304 people who got reinfected. | |
| And out of these people, 1,300 of them were mild cases, while only four were severe cases. | |
| The researchers also noted that there were no cases of deaths among the reinfected. | |
| Furthermore, in general, the reinfections were found to be less severe overall than the primary infections. | |
| On that point, here's in fact what these researchers said in the study. | |
| Quote, And then, this is how one of the lead researchers in this particular study, here's how he summarized their findings. | |
| Accordingly, for a person who has already had a primary infection, the risk of having a severe reinfection is only approximately 1% of the risk of a previously uninfected person having a severe primary infection. | |
| Now, while this study doesn't exactly make clear how long the protection lasts, according to the actual data that was found in the pages of the study, the median time between the first illness and reinfection was about nine months. | |
| And this is leading these researchers to then go on and say that they are studying whether natural immunity to COVID mirrors our natural immunity to the common cold. | |
| Here's, in fact, what they wrote on this front. | |
| In regards to the research that they are continuously doing, quote, Now again, | |
| this is not the first study to suggest this conclusion that natural immunity not only exists but is also rather strong. | |
| There have in fact been over 100 such studies to this day. | |
| However, as I mentioned earlier, this one out of Qatar is one of the largest studies and it adds to the growing body of evidence surrounding natural immunity as a whole. | |
| If you'd like to read this study in its entirety for yourself, I will throw a link to the PDF version of it into the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And all I ask in return is that while you're making your way down there to that link, Take a quick detour to smash, smash, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. | |
| And now, before we move on over and discuss how the WHO named the new variant of the virus Omicron in order to not upset China, I would like to take a quick moment and introduce our sponsor for today's episode, and I will do so from the sound booth. | |
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| Now, Roman in the studio, back to you. | |
| Imagine for a moment that over the weekend, over the last weekend, you were a television news producer. | |
| You needed to make news for TV. And before you, there were five possible stories that you could have your news channel focus on. | |
| Here are those five possible stories. | |
| A, the start of the Ghislaine Maxwell's child trafficking case. | |
| B, the start of Jussie Smollett's trial over his alleged hate crime hoax. | |
| C, the organized looting of big box retailers that's happening across the entire country. | |
| D, the aftermath in Wakasha after that guy drove his car into a Christmas parade. | |
| Or E, you could focus on a new virus variant over in South Africa, which might or might not be as dangerous as the one that is spreading right now. | |
| And if you chose letter E, well, then you would be in the majority. | |
| Because somehow, it appears that almost all the major news networks across the entire country, they decided, in sync, to focus on the last point, the new virus variant. | |
| I always find it amazing how that works. | |
| Let's go through a bit about what we know regarding this new variant, starting with its name, which is, as you might know, the Omicron variant. | |
| Now, you might look at that name and you might say to yourself, that's weird, where do they come up with these random names anyway? | |
| Well, that is a good question. | |
| And the answer to that is actually quite simple. | |
| There is a naming convention for these different COVID variants that uses the Greek alphabet. | |
| And so the initial variant, which came out of the city of Wuhan, it was simply called the Alpha variant for the first letter in the Greek alphabet. | |
| And then afterwards, you had a couple of small-time variants, the Beta and Gamma variants, which didn't make much fanfare. | |
| But afterwards, you had the Delta variant, which came out of India, and Delta is the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet, and obviously that one made a big splash. | |
| We're still talking about it to this very day. | |
| Then afterwards, after the Delta variant, scientists were able to identify eight other COVID variants, each of which was given a different letter according to the Greek alphabet. | |
| And so you had the Epsilon variant, the Zeta variant, the Eta variant, the Theta variant, the Iota variant, the Kappa variant, the Lambda variant, and the Mu variant. | |
| And here's where things get a little bit interesting. | |
| Because you might be watching this program right now, and perhaps you have some understanding of the Greek alphabet. | |
| Maybe you're a Greek-American, or maybe you studied the Greek alphabet in college. | |
| And therefore, you know that after the letter Mu, the next two letters are Nu and Shi. | |
| So, you might be asking yourself, why did the WHO skip these two Greek letters, and instead, this newly discovered variant that came out of South Africa, it was instead called Omicron? | |
| Well, we reached out to the WHO, and here's what a spokesperson for them replied to us in an email. | |
| Two letters were skipped, new and she, because new is too easily confounded with new, and she was not used because it is a common surname, and the WHO best practices for naming new diseases suggest avoiding causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, or ethnic groups. | |
| And so let me just reiterate their reasoning. | |
| In order to not cause confusion, the WHO skipped the letter new, spelled N-U, in order to not confuse people who might just think that it's a new variant. | |
| And that actually sounds somewhat reasonable. | |
| But then, the WHO also skipped the next letter, she, spelled X-I, in order to not offend anybody named she. | |
| Now I wonder, who might they be afraid of offending? | |
| Is it some random guy with the surname Xi? | |
| Or is it perhaps Xi Jinping, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party? | |
| The same party, by the way, that covered up the virus when it first began spreading in the city of Wuhan, and by some estimates, actually caused the pandemic that we saw play out across the entire world. | |
| However, due to the decision of the WHO, over the holiday weekend, we here in America, when we were gathered around the table, we were inundated with news reports of the Omicron variant rather than the Xi variant. | |
| Very, very convenient. | |
| Now, naturally enough, this decision by the WHO caused a bit of backlash with, for instance, Senator Ted Cruz saying this. | |
| If the WHO is this scared of the Chinese Communist Party, how can they be trusted to call them out the next time that they're trying to cover up a catastrophic global pandemic? | |
| Likewise, Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas, he said this... | |
| Now, regardless of the name of the new variant, let's discuss the new variant itself, which at this moment, despite the non-stop media coverage... | |
| It's not exactly clear whether it presents a greater risk than the other variants that are spreading around the world. | |
| In fact, according to a statement from the director of South Africa's Medical Association, she said that the symptoms that are being caused by this new Omicron variant, they are unusual, but taken as a whole, they are rather mild. | |
| Here's specifically what she had to say. | |
| What we are seeing clinically in South Africa, and remember, I'm at the epicenter of this where I'm practicing, is extremely mild. | |
| For us, these are mild cases. | |
| We haven't admitted anyone. | |
| I've spoken to other colleagues of mine, and they give the same picture. | |
| Now, that same doctor further added that the way that the Western media is currently covering this variant, at least in her opinion, she says that it is a, quote, storm in a teacup, end quote, meaning essentially that they're blowing it way out of proportion, and her opinion, given the fact that she has only seen very mild cases thus far. | |
| And then in terms of the unusual types of symptoms that she says she's seeing that she has not seen with other strains of COVID in the past, it includes things like a high pulse rate as well as a slight cough, And even though she says that at this moment, in her opinion at least, the Western media is blowing this whole thing out of proportion, she does add that, quote, But this is what we are seeing. | |
| So are we seriously worried? | |
| No. | |
| We are concerned and we watch what's happening. | |
| But for now we're saying, okay, there's a whole hype out there. | |
| We're not sure why. | |
| Now, in terms of what makes this Omicron variant different than the other variants that have been spreading, according to South African scientist, a man by the name of Tulio de Oliveira, he's been studying this new variant since it came out. | |
| And he gave a statement to the media last Thursday saying that this new variant has about 30 plus mutations on the spike protein, which is a lot more, by the way, than the Delta variant. | |
| But he says that it could mean one of two things. | |
| And this is what scientists are sort of split on right now. | |
| Either the large number of mutations can help this new virus bypass either the natural immunity or the vaccine immunity that people have, or, and or potentially, it could make the virus actually less stable, meaning that it's less powerful. | |
| And that's why there are so many mild cases currently being reported. | |
| So we'll just have to ultimately wait and see which of those two hypotheses ultimately play out. | |
| Now, you are beginning to see different reactions in the global community because right now, initially, the virus was seen in South Africa, but it has now popped up in Botswana, it's now popped up in Israel, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Canada, as well as the Netherlands, and so different countries are reacting differently. | |
| So, for instance, you have Mexico. | |
| The president of Mexico recently came out and he said that they're watching the situation, but they're not going to be overreacting. | |
| They're just keeping an eye on things, following the scientists' recommendations. | |
| However, you have other places like, for instance, New York State, where we filmed this program. | |
| And even though right now in the United States there has not been one reported case, let alone in the state of New York, New York State, according to the governor, is now under an emergency declaration. | |
| Just yesterday, Kathy Hochul, who is the governor of New York, she issued a state of emergency for the state of New York over this new Omicron variant. | |
| Again, even though there has been no reported cases. | |
| Likewise, Joe Biden, he actually issued a travel ban on actually eight different countries in the south of Africa, essentially limiting their travel into the United States. | |
| Which is ironic given the fact that if you remember about a year and a half ago when President Trump issued a similar travel ban over to African countries, Joe Biden wrote this on Twitter. | |
| Trump further diminished the U.S. in the eyes of the world by expanding his travel ban. | |
| This new African ban is designed to make it harder for black and brown people to immigrate to the United States. | |
| It's a disgrace and we cannot let him succeed. | |
| And it's exactly statements like that that make me believe that whenever a politician opens his mouth or sends out a tweet, he is just playing politics. | |
| Now, likely the losers in all this are going to be the people living in the south of Africa who now cannot travel to many countries, including the United States. | |
| However, the winner, in my opinion, would have to be Moderna. | |
| Because after this story broke about the Omicron variant, they came out with a statement and said that they are studying the new variant and that within 100 days, once they begin to study it, They can have a new vaccine out specifically for the Omicron variant. | |
| And upon that statement, well, take a look at their stock price. | |
| It rose by several percentage points. | |
| So congratulations to anyone that holds Moderna stock. | |
| And now, Roman in the studio, back to you. | |
| Now, if you'd like to read more about this new variant that came out of South Africa, About the different reactions to it, especially here in America, or about the very generous naming by the WHO, I will throw all those links into the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And again, all I ask in return is that if you haven't already, take a quick moment to smash, smash, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. | |
| Now lastly, since you've completed this episode of Facts Matter, I would highly recommend that you go on over to Epic TV and check out an awesome episode of American Thought Leaders where John sat down with author John Fund and they discussed America's broken election system and specifically how we are lagging far behind Mexico, Canada, as well as Europe in terms of election safeguards. | |
| Here's a trailer for that episode. | |
| 48 European nations. | |
| Almost all of them require voter ID at the polls. | |
| How prevalent is election fraud really? | |
| And who is being hurt most? | |
| Many minority voters live in urban areas or in impoverished rural areas where political machines dominate. | |
| And they will include voter fraud as part of their tactics. | |
| Today I sit down with John Fund, co-author, with Hans von Spakowski, of Our Broken Elections, How the Left Changed the Way You Vote. | |
| There's a civil right not to have their vote cancelled out by someone who shouldn't be voting, someone who's dead. | |
| This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekyll. | |
| If you want to check out that awesome episode, as well as all the other phenomenal content over on Epic TV, I'll throw a link to it. | |
| It'll be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you click on it. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| I hope you subscribe. | |
| And I hope that you join us on this journey of exploring this beautiful, beautiful world through honors journalism that is based in truth and tradition. | |
| Lastly, if you haven't already, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. | |
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| And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. |
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