Friday, July 09, 2021 by: Arsenio Toledo
Tags: badhealth, badmedicine, badscience, coronavirus, coronavirus vaccines, covid-19, herd immunity, immune system, immunity, infection, natural immunity, vaccine immunity, vaccines
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(Natural News) When government officials and public health experts alike discuss herd immunity with regards to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), they usually talk about vaccinating as many people as possible. But as they push for vaccinations as the only way to achieve herd immunity against the coronavirus, there is one aspect they are willfully neglecting: natural immunity.
When a person
gets infected with COVID-19 and recovers, that person has already defeated the
infection and therefore already has natural immunity. This coronavirus survivor
already has an immune system that is prepared to fight against future potential
COVID-19 infections for the rest of his life. This means people with natural
immunity do not need a vaccine.
Multiple studies show natural immunity good at preventing COVID-19
The idea that
people with natural immunity do not need to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is
supported by multiple studies. (Related: Rand Paul exposes
total fraud, deception of Fauci and the CDC, who deliberately ignore NATURAL
immunity.)
In May,
the World Health Organization (WHO) released a
scientific update stating that people who have recovered from prior COVID-19
infections have developed a strong protective
immune response.
The WHO
summarized its update by stating that within four weeks of infection, 90 to 99
percent of people who have recovered from the coronavirus can develop
detectable neutralizing antibodies that can prevent any future infections. The
WHO’s report said the immune system had “durable memories” of the virus up
to eight months after the initial infection.
Another study
published in the journal Nature in late May found that most
people who were infected with the coronavirus had immunological memory of the
disease in their bone marrow. This strongly suggests that people who have
recovered from COVID-19 are still able to produce antibodies against it a year
out.
A second
study published in BioRxic found that cells known as “memory
B” can fend off COVID-19 for at least 12 months after infection. This
finding meshes well with the prior findings of the WHO and the study published
in Nature. Memory B cells have been found to rapidly reproduce and
generate coronavirus antibodies once it interacts with it again.
A third study
from the Cleveland Clinic found that natural immunity to the
coronavirus may be “as good as being vaccinated.” The researchers in this study
followed more than 52,000 employees of the clinic for five months. Over 1,300
of the employees had prior COVID-19 infections and remained unvaccinated.
The
researchers found that not a single one of the more than 1,300 employees with
prior infections were reinfected during the five months that they were
monitored. They concluded that people with laboratory-confirmed and symptomatic
coronavirus infections are unlikely to benefit from vaccinations.
People with natural immunity could be discriminated against if
they aren’t treated the same as vaccinated individuals
Dr. Jeffrey
Klausner and Dr. Noah Kojima, writing for Medpage Today, noted that
public health policymakers are ignoring “the complexities of the human immune
system” in favor of maintaining discussions of supposed immunity from
vaccinations.
“If
SARS-CoV-2 immunity is similar to other severe coronavirus infections like
SARS-CoV-1 immunity, that protection could last at least 17 years.” they wrote.
“However, tests to measure cellular immunity are complex and expensive, making
them hard to get and preventing their use in routine medical practice or in
public health surveys of the population.”
If people
with natural immunity against COVID-19 continue to be excluded from discussions
regarding herd immunity, it could lead to disastrous consequences. Jon Sanders,
writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, surmised that unvaccinated
individuals with natural immunity could be discriminated against.
“People with
natural immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal
commerce and who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they
don’t need in order to fulfill a headcount that confuses a means with the end,”
wrote Sanders.
Klausner and
Kojima recommend that moving forward, public health policymakers should include
natural immunity as evidence of immunity “equal to that of vaccination.”
“That immunity
should be given the same societal status as vaccine-induced immunity. Such a
policy will greatly reduce anxiety and increase access to travel, events,
family visits and more.”
This kind of
policy focus will allow people who have recovered from COVID-19 access to the
same privileges currently being enjoyed by vaccinated individuals.
Learn more
about natural immunity to coronavirus at Pandemic.news.
Sources
include:
WHY
IS THERE SUCH RELUCTANCE TO DISCUSS NATURAL IMMUNITY?
July 7, 2021
Jon Sanders, AIER
If you’re among those of us
who aren’t tribally invested in Covid politics but would like good information
about when life will resume as normal, chances are you’re interested in herd
immunity. You’re likely not interested in having
to rely on the Internet Archive for good information on herd immunity. Alas,
it’s become a go-to place for retrieving, as it were, previously published
information on herd immunity that became inconvenient post-vaccine and then
virtually Memory-Holed.
Over the past 15 months,
the litany of Experts’ True Facts and Science regarding various aspects of
SARS-CoV-2 has changed more often than the starting lineup of a bad minor
league ball club. Covid-19 is spread by droplets, especially from asymptomatic
people, until one day it was airborne all along and people who weren’t sick in
all likelihood weren’t even sick. Stay at home, you’re safer indoors, even stay
away from parks and beaches; well, actually, outdoors is the place to be. Masks
don’t work against viruses and are actually unhealthy to wear if you’re not
sick, then suddenly they did work and without one you might as well be shooting
people. Everyone knows and PolitiFact verified that the virus couldn’t have
been created in the prominent infectious disease lab doing gain-of-function
research on coronaviruses in bats coincidentally at Covid Ground Zero until,
one day, PolitiFact had to retract
the entire “Pants on Fire!” article. And so forth.
Unfortunately, information
about herd immunity has also not been immune to this kind of meddling. Until
recent months, people readily understood that active immunity came about either
by natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity comes from
battling and defeating an actual infection, then having your immune system
primed for the rest of your life to fight it off if it ever shows up again.
This immunity is achieved at a sometimes very high personal price.
Vaccine-induced immunity is
to prime your immune system with a weaker, non-threatening form of the invading
infection, so that it’s ready to fight off the real thing should you ever
encounter it, and without your having first to risk severe illness or death.
Those interested in herd
immunity in itself likely don’t have a moral or political preference for one
form of immunity to the exclusion of the other. Immunity is
immunity, regardless of
whether a particular person has it naturally or by a vaccine. All immunity
contributes to herd immunity.
Others, however, are much
less circumspect. They seem to have forgotten the ultimate goal of the public
campaign for people to receive vaccination against Covid-19. It’s not to be vaccinated; it’s to have immunity. People with natural
immunity — i.e., people whose immune systems have faced Covid-19 and won —
don’t need a vaccine.
They do, however, need to
be considered in any good-faith discussion of herd immunity. There are two
prongs to herd immunity, as we used to all know, and those with natural
immunity are the prong that’s being ignored. It’s not just mere oversight,
however. Fostering such ignorance can lead to several bad outcomes:
§ People with natural
immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal commerce, and
who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they don’t need
in order to fulfill a head count that confuses a means with the end
§ The nation could already be
at herd immunity while governors and health bureaucrats continue to exert
extreme emergency powers, harming people’s liberties and livelihoods
§ People already terrified of
Covid — including especially those who’ve already had it — would continue to
live in fear, avoiding human interaction and worrying beyond all reason
§ People could come to
distrust even sound advice from experts about important matters, as they
witness and grow to expect how what “the experts” counsel diverges from what
they know to be wise counsel while it conforms to and amplifies the temporary
needs of the political class
· Those of us wanting good information certainly
don’t want any of those outcomes. But others seem perfectly fine to risk them.
They include not only elected officials, members of the media, political
talking heads, self-important bureaucrats, and their wide-eyed acolytes
harassing shoppers, but strangely also highly prominent health organizations.
For example, late last
year Jeffrey Tucker showed that the World Health
Organization (WHO) suddenly, and “for reasons unknown,” changed its definition
of “herd immunity.” Using screenshots from a cached version on the Internet
Archive, Tucker showed how the WHO altered its definition in such a way as to
erase completely the role of natural immunity. Before, the WHO rightly said it
“happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous
infection.” The WHO’s change stated that it happens “if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not long after Tucker’s
piece appeared, the WHO restored natural immunity to its definition.
The Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), seemingly apropos of nothing, on May 19 issued a “safety communication” to warn that
FDA-authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests “should not be used to evaluate
immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time.” The FDA’s concern appears to
be that taking an antibody test too soon after receiving a vaccination may fail
to show vaccine-induced antibodies, but why preclude its use for “identifying
people with an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2 from a recent or prior
infection?” Especially after stating outright that “Antibody tests can play an
important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the
SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”
Then there is the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that
ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance. He had told people that herd immunity
would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity, and then he started publicly cinching
those numbers up: 75 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent, even 90 percent (as if
Covid-19 were as infectious as measles). He is quoted in the New York Times admitting to doing so
deliberately to affect people’s behavior:
“When polls said only about
half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would
take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60
percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so
I went to 80, 85.“
Now — or better put, as of this
writing — Fauci
has taken to arguing herd immunity is a “mystical elusive number,” a distracting “endgame,” and therefore not
worth considering. Only vaccinations are worth counting. As he put it recently,
“We don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity
because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people
[it] makes society be more and more protected.”
While composing an article about natural immunity and herd immunity for
my home state of North Carolina, I happened to notice that the Mayo Clinic had
removed a compelling factoid about natural immunity. It’s something I had
quoted in an earlier discussion of the matter and wanted to revisit it.
Here’s what the Mayo Clinic
once wanted people to know in its page on “Herd Immunity and COVID-19” with respect to natural
immunity: “[T]hose who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) pandemic were later
immune to infection with the H1N1 flu, a subtype of influenza A.” The Mayo
Clinic pointed out that H1N1 was during the 2009-10 flu season, which would be 92 years later. That finding attested to
just how powerful and long-lived natural immunity could be.
The Mayo Clinic also reoriented its page to feature vaccination over “the natural infection method” (method?) and added a section on “the outlook for achieving herd immunity in the U.S.” This new section stated that “it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity” but encouraged people nonetheless that “the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at protecting against severe illness requiring hospitalization and death … allowing people to better be able to live with the virus.”
Why, from people who know
better, is there so much interest in downplaying or erasing natural immunity?
Is it because it’s hard to
quantify how many people have natural immunity? Is it out of a mix of good
intentions and worry, that discussing natural immunity would somehow discourage
(“nudge,” in Fauci’s term) people from getting vaccines who otherwise would? Is
it simple oversight, being so focused on vaccinations that they just plain
forgot about natural immunity? Or is something else at work?
Whatever the reason, it’s
keeping Americans in the dark about how many people have active immunity from
Covid-19. It’s keeping people needlessly fearful and suspicious of each other.
It’s empowering executive overreach. Worst of all, it’s tempting people to
consider government and business restrictions on the unvaccinated, regardless
of their actual immunity.
About the
Author
Jon Sanders is an economist
and the senior fellow of regulatory studies and research editor at the John
Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Jon researches a broad
range of areas, including energy and electricity policy, occupational
licensing, red tape and overregulation, alcohol policy, executive orders and
overreach, poverty and opportunity, cronyism and other public-choice problems,
emerging ideas and economic growth, and other issues as they arise.
