Shame on you!

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.28.24312739v1

I have read the above-mentioned publication and feel compelled to respond (see text underscored below) to the statements cited in italics under the "Temporal Analysis Results" section of the publication:

While other diseases like influenza or respiratory syncytial virus are characterized by clear onset/offset dates, SARS-CoV-2 is consistently circulating in the population since its outbreak in 2020 [31].

This clearly illustrates there is no herd immunity in the (highly C-19 vaccinated) population!

The peak timings between hospitalization admission and SARS-CoV-2 concentrations visually decrease between the first and second wave. The second wave peaks across the US over a shorter time period. Reasons for this could be an increased infectivity of the COVID-19 variant and/or a rise in transmission due to more population mixing during the holiday travel.

Given the purported critical impact of holidays on the pandemic (we’ve repeatedly heard how holidays and travel seem to amplify it!), one might even wonder why no ban has been placed on holidays and travel! We all know that the near overlap of hospitalization admissions and SARSCoV-2 (SC-2) concentrations in wastewater is primarily due to the high intrinsic infectiousness of the currently co-circulating SC-2 lineages, combined with the high prevalence of mild or asymptomatic infections and transmission.

The epidemic burden on the general population was lower – considering that case fatality was 60% lower in the studied timeframe, compared to the same season one-year earlier [2]. The increasing population contamination, the rise in vaccination levels and the changing SARS-CoV-2 variants with less severe symptoms led to greater resilience of society to the impacts of the epidemic.

It is shameful that even scientists continue to suggest that increasing herd immunity (“increasing population contamination”) combined with higher vaccination levels and the emergence of less virulent variants (i.e., causing less severe symptoms) are responsible for lowering the case fatality rate. Notwithstanding the unambiguous increase in excess deaths, mitigation of severe Covid-19 (C-19) disease in highly C-19 vaccinated populations primarily occurs as a result of the virulence inhibiting effect of polyreactive non-neutralizing antibodies (PNNAbs) in vaccinated individuals experiencing vaccine breakthrough infections, thereby preventing these populations from developing true herd immunity.

While these scientists erroneously conclude that the decrease in C-19 death rates is due to herd immunity and vaccination efforts that supposedly support it, they fail to explain why—unlike during a natural pandemic—hospitalization rates and SC-2 activity in wastewater have nearly converged. Their erroneous interpretation of the decreased C-19 case fatality rate also leads them to ignore the uncontrolled dynamics of the virus’s evolutionary path, which is now creating a breeding ground for new SC-2 lineages. Some of these lineages have enhanced virulence potential and are likely to be selected when the immune pressure exerted by these highly vaccinated populations exceeds the threshold required to control viral virulence.