After months of denial and dodging, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report showing that, compared to getting the shots, natural immunity to COVID-19 is 2.8 times more effective in keeping people out of the hospital and 3.3 percent to 4.7 percent more effective in preventing reinfection.
The study, “COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations by COVID-19 Vaccination Status and Previous COVID-19 Diagnosis—California and New York, May–November 2021,” was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on January 19.
The analysis proves what many suspected throughout the pandemic, says Joel Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and editor of the Pandemic Blunder Newsletter.
“The refusal by U.S. government public health agencies to formally give credit to people with natural immunity obtained from prior COVID infection made no sense,” said Hirschhorn.
“The only apparent motivation was to NOT give those people a way out of getting experimental COVID vaccines and to NOT give them a way out of obeying all kinds of mandates. It has nothing to do with ‘following the science,’” said Hirschhorn.
Shots ‘Safest Strategy’
The study’s authors looked at COVID-19 cases in California and New York, the two states with high mortality rates from COVID, where one in six COVID-19 deaths in the United States occurred, and found vaccination was less effective than natural immunity in preventing reinfection with the virus.
Despite the findings, the authors emphasize the importance of getting the shots.
“Although the epidemiology of COVID-19 might change as new variants emerge, vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequalae, and death,” states the report.
‘Hybrid Immunity’ Slightly Better
The study spins its results to push the agency’s persistent narrative, states Marty Makary, M.D., a surgeon at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, professor, and public policy researcher, in a commentary in The Wall Street Journal on January 26.
“It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for COVID,” wrote Makary.
“But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone,” wrote Makary. “In other words, vaccinating people who had already had COVID didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.”
“The science has always been crystal clear: natural immunity is more effective, longer-lasting, and safer than vaccine immunity,” said Hirschhorn.
Natural Immunity Persists
A new report by Johns Hopkins researchers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on February 3 found natural immunity persists over time, writes Hirschhorn in his newsletter on Substack.
“The results are spectacular,” wrote Hirschhorn.
“It shows that people with natural immunity have the same level of antibodies no matter when they were infected,” wrote Hirschhorn. “The study proves that people who have recovered from Covid have far better protection from future infection than vaccinated people.”
AnneMarie Schieber (amschieber@heartland.org) is the managing editor of Health Care News.