In July, a study from Israel was published showing that natural immunity was far superior to vaccine immunity:
Coronavirus patients who recovered from the virus were far less likely to become infected during the latest wave of the pandemic than people who were vaccinated against COVID, according to numbers presented to the Israeli Health Ministry.
According to a report by Israel’s Channel 13, Health Ministry data on the wave of COVID outbreaks which began this May show that Israelis with immunity from natural infection were far less likely to become infected again in comparison to Israelis who only had immunity via vaccination.
More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously – that is, less than 1% of the new cases. Roughly 40% of new cases – or more than 3,000 patients – involved people who had been infected despite being vaccinated.
With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with COVID.
By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.
If you go to the CDC’s website on the Chickenpox page, the CDC only recommends getting the Chickenpox vaccine if you haven’t already had it:
In other words, the CDC fully understands and respects natural immunity to Chickenpox. We have all known how Chickenpox’s natural immunity works for decades. This is why parents would deliberately get their kids infected with Chickenpox when another kid in class got it: because natural immunity is for life.
Did you know that in 2008, researchers from the University of Minnesota discovered that people who had survived the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and were still alive in 2008 still had natural immunity to the Spanish Flu?
It’s an extraordinary study that shows just how incredible our bodies are at fighting off infections and viruses:
90 years their immunity lasted!
Natural immunity is an incredible thing.
Right now, we obviously don’t have enough data on how long natural immunity to Covid-19 lasts, mostly because not enough time has passed since the outbreak of the virus.
However, the Israeli study showed a reinfection rate of just 0.0086%, which indicates natural immunity is very strong and way stronger than vaccine immunity, although it gives us no indication of how long-lasting natural immunity is.
And this is why the CDC still recommends those who have already had Covid to still get vaccinated: because maybe natural immunity doesn’t last that long. I remember when I got Covid last September, the conventional wisdom was that natural immunity following recovery only lasted a few months.
But then, in November 2020, a study came out showing that those who had recovered from Covid would likely be producing antibodies for years to come. This is via the New York Times:
How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.
Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date.
“That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.
The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control.
And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering.
So immunity to the Spanish Flu lasted a lifetime, and immunity to the original SARS (SARS-Covid-1) lasts 17 years and counting.
The findings are consistent with encouraging evidence emerging from other labs. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by the immunologist Marion Pepper, had earlier shown that certain “memory” cells that were produced following infection with the coronavirus persist for at least three months in the body.
A study published last week also found that people who have recovered from Covid-19 have powerful and protective killer immune cells even when antibodies are not detectable.
These studies “are all by and large painting the same picture, which is that once you get past those first few critical weeks, the rest of the response looks pretty conventional,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona.
So we’ve known for almost a year now that natural immunity to Covid is very strong. This study that appeared in Nature in May bears the headline, “Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime.”
We know based on the history of past coronaviruses like the Spanish Flu and SARS that natural immunity lasts a very long time,
The issue is that the government can’t exactly recommend people just go out and catch Covid so that they gain natural immunity. It’s not like the Chickenpox scenario when you were 8 years old.
We already know the vaccine isn’t going to get the job done. The FDA has just today shot down the White House’s plan for rolling out booster shots to the masses, probably because they know that more people taking a failing vaccine isn’t going to make it magically work. It still doesn’t change the underlying fact that the vaccine doesn’t work.
You take the vaccine, it stops working after a few months. You take a booster shot, it also stops working after a few months. In that situation, you’re basically locked into a cycle of never-ending booster shots, all because you refuse to admit the vaccine simply doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.
(The remarkable thing about the FDA rejecting the booster shot plan is that the booster shot plan was basically the embodiment of the government’s “solutions” to literally every problem it has ever faced: just doing more of the same thing over and over again even in the face of repeated failures. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, etc. Just keep throwing money at the problem even if it’s clearly not working.)
We know masks and social distancing and shelter in place measures did nothing to stem the proliferation of the virus. The virus is gonna virus no matter what we try to do about it.
It will only be done once we hit the natural herd immunity threshold, wherever that may be.