Eric Topol, one of the most mentally vacant Corona astrologers in the Western hemisphere, recently tweeted about this preprint on why being reinfected with SARS-2 is worse than not being reinfected with SARS-2. It’s an observational study built from US Department of Veterans Affairs databases, comparing 6-month mortality and severe outcome rates in 38,926 reinfected people, against 257,427 once-infected people, and a control group of 5,396,855 uninfected people.

The study examined outcomes through 4 September 2021, so it doesn’t account for reinfections with the milder Omicron. Even so, I think the authors substantially overestimate the risks of reinfection, but that’s a matter for a future post, if it even matters. Here, I’ll just note a suspicious oddity I found while rooting around in the figures and the supplementary tables – an oddity surrounding specifically the one portion of the paper that might matter for assessing the effectiveness of the vaccines.