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Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of Coffeehouse Shops, the Spectators' Daily Politics

Podcast. I'm Isbar Hardman and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and Fraser Nelson.

Well, there have been a number of really interesting studies out in the past few

days about vaccines and our immunity to COVID developing naturally. Fraser, tell us a little bit

more about this. Well, Israel right now is at the cutting edge of these studies. Israel started

vaccinating people before anybody else. It's achieved a higher level of

vaccination than any other developed country. And unfortunately, it's now also seeing a delta

wave of infections. Now, for a while, we've been seeing reports of Israeli medics, just verbal

reports, saying that it's strange that they're getting far more people

double-vaxed coming in than they are people who've had COVID before. They've also been quotes

to the effect that the so-called natural immunity, or shall we say recovery immunity, is proving

stronger than the vaccinated immunity. Now, that was just basically hearsay observations from medics at the

Israeli front line. But what we've had now is a study of, I mean, like 800,000 people in Israel. And that

study suggests that, roughly speaking, those who were double-vaxxed but didn't have COVID are

something like 13 times more likely to contract the virus than

somebody who's had COVID. That's, by the way, asymptomatic transmission. It's the multiple for

symptomatic transmission is seven times. Now, this is important because it's a serious study

with a large number of people

and also raises quite interesting ethical questions about vaccine passports in the West.

...