The large-scale study out of Israel, conducted on over half a million people, compared the immunity of patients who had received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech injection to unvaccinated people who had been previously infected.
"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity,” researchers concluded.
Alarmingly, the study also found that people who had been vaccinated have a 13-fold increased risk of breakthrough infection from the dreaded Delta variant, compared to the previously infected.
“People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered,”
reported Bloomberg, commenting the data demonstrates the “challenge” of solely relying on a vaccine to defeat Covid.
“SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected,” researchers also stated.