Two years into the pandemic, public health officials, politicians, and others are still denying that natural immunity gained from contracting COVID-19 is superior to the immunity generated by vaccines.
The consequences of this denial have been catastrophic for many individuals who have lost their jobs or been discriminated against because they haven’t been vaccinated but acquired natural immunity after being infected with the coronavirus.
Every peer-reviewed study has shown that natural immunity is better protection against becoming seriously ill with COVID than vaccination. And those with “hybrid immunity” — natural immunity plus being vaccinated — have no better protection against becoming seriously ill with COVID than natural immunity alone.
The CDC — having delayed releasing any data on reinfection rates — finally relented and released information on reinfections in California and New York. It turns out that “natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.”
Yet the CDC still recommends that “vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequelae, and death.”
Dr. Marty Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that pointed out the cost of disparaging natural immunity.
Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.
The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness.
Before everyone gets bent out of shape and starts spinning conspiracy theories about Big Pharma and politicians, it should be pointed out that antibody tests to determine if you’ve been infected with COVID, even though you never developed symptoms, are not cheap and not 100 percent reliable. But just recently, a Swiss company developed a rapid COVID antibody test that promises to be much cheaper and far more reliable.
The research, done in conjunction by the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the University of Basel, hopes to provide a more reliable and immediate way of determining a person’s antibodies for Covid-19.
Unlike current tests, which must be done in a lab, this test provides an immediate result. Results are available between 10 and 30 minutes and the technology required is a standard mobile phone camera.
The test also indicates the number of antibodies in the blood, rather than a binary yes or no as with current tests.
But the drive to fire people who are not in compliance with a vaccine mandate ended up costing lives — lives that could have been saved if intelligent policy directives from public health agencies would have spared those with natural immunity.
Makary explained:
Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders. Meanwhile, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.
The failure to recognize the data on natural immunity is hurting U.S. hospitals, especially in rural areas. MultiCare, a hospital system in Washington state, fired 55 staff members on Oct. 18 for being out of compliance with Gov. Jay Inslee’s vaccine mandate—and that was in addition to an undisclosed number of staffers who quit ahead of the vaccination deadline. The loss of workers contributed to a full-blown staffing crisis.
Using the excuse that “the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is a new virus and we just don’t know a lot about it” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s now a question of confirmation bias being used to shape public health policy. And bureaucrats looking for ways to confirm their own flawed hypotheses about natural immunity don’t do anyone any good as we look to emerge from this pandemic.
The CDC, FDA, and other federal agencies should just take their own advice and “follow the science.”