Stronger, More Robust Natural Immunity Thwarts Any Case for “Vaccine Passports”

Jon Sanders – September 9, 2021

A growing body of research is making it increasingly clear that natural immunity to Covid-19 owing to previous infection is stronger, more durable, and broader than vaccine-induced immunity. Apart from not being unusual among infectious diseases, this fact has significant implications for governmental, school, employer, and business plans to harass and restrict people who aren’t vaccinated.

For example, on June 4 Stanford Medical School physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard Medical School biostatistician and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, and University of Oxford theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta summarized it this way (embedding several studies along the way):

It is now well-established that natural immunity develops upon infection with SARS-CoV-2 in a manner analogous to other coronaviruses. While natural infection may not provide permanent infection-blocking immunity, it offers anti–disease immunity against severe disease and death that is likely permanent. Among the millions that have recovered from COVID19, exceedingly few have become sick again.

Most recently, new research out of Israel makes the case that a prior Covid-19 infection offers far superior immunity than do the vaccinations. Gazit et al. (medRxiv preprint, posted Aug. 25, 2021) compared vaccinated people without prior Covid-19 infections with unvaccinated people who had recovered from prior infections. Matching them by infection/vaccination periods to test their “immune activation” time (16,125 people in each group; i.e., 32,250 people), they found the vaccinated were six to 13 times more likely to have breakthrough infections than were the naturally immune to have reinfection. Adjusting for comorbidities, they found the vaccinated were 27 times more likely to have symptomatic breakthrough infections than were the naturally immune to have symptomatic reinfection.

Furthermore, there is reason to believe that for the previously infected, vaccination could be detrimental to their immune response. Camara et al. (bioRxiv preprint, posted March 22, 2021) found that “COVID-19 recovered individuals do not seem to benefit from the standard regimen for COVID-19 vaccination.” As they wrote, “On the contrary, in individuals with a pre-existing immunity against SARS-CoV-2, the second vaccine does not only fail to boost humoral immunity but determines a contraction of the spike-specific T cell response.” For the previously infected, then, there is reason to believe that the vaccine poses no benefits, only costs............To Read More....