When the COVID vaccines were being rolled out, the government promised us that vaccines would be the gateway at getting us back to a pre-pandemic normal. It was seen as such a path to salvation that the government made a failed attempt at a misguided vaccine mandate. Back in October 2021, I argued against vaccine mandates providing 10 reasons as to why they were unnecessary. One of those reasons was that of natural immunity, which is the immunity from a disease that is acquired through infection. Natural immunity is nothing new. It existed for the Spanish flu. The CDC recognizes natural immunity for chickenpox, as well as measles, mumps and rubella.
With that being said, it seems mysterious as to why the existence of natural immunity, which was a standard understanding amongst epidemiologists and immunologists pre-COVID, became so controversial. I will get to that momentarily. But first, let's get back to the evidence base. Back in October 2021, there were some preliminary data on COVID and natural immunity. Now that it is about two years after we started distributing vaccines, it is nice to have a clearer picture on this topic. According to a meta-analysis of 65 studies from The Lancet (Stein et al., 2023) that was released last week, natural immunity is not ineffective, as the figures below show. Far from it! This was what the report had to say on the matter:
Although protection from past infection wanes over time, the level of protection against re-infection, symptomatic disease, and severe disease appears to be at least as durable, if not more so, than the that provided by two-dose vaccination with the mRNA vaccines for ancestral, alpha, delta, and omicron BA.1 variants.
A comprehensive review of the best available data shows that natural immunity is as good, and better in many cases, than vaccine immunity. However, that did not stop Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros from saying in an Armed Services Committee testimony last week that "natural immunity is not something we believe in."
You can say that Cisneros does not know any better because he does not have a background in public health. In 2021, CDC director Rochelle Walensky could not explain why the CDC did not research the topic. And let us not forget former NIAID director Anthony Fauci who said in 2021 that vaccine immunity was vastly superior to natural immunity. In a recent paper that he co-authored (Morens et al., 2023), the authors (including Fauci) admit that they did not expect influenza or COVID vaccines to confer the same immunity that other vaccines provide. This study concluded that "they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity." This is significant because Fauci and his colleagues essentially admit that they did not expect vaccines to get us out of COVID.
This might sound like this is a scientific debate above all else. What do politics or public policy have to do with it? While the effectiveness of natural immunity is indeed a scientific question, public health policy is only as good as the science that is informing the public policy. Yes, science is a process of testing hypotheses of cause and effect. There is always the possibility that conclusions can change in the event that better evidence can come along. At the same time, public health recommendations should be made on the best available evidence.
This is not to say that vaccines are bad. I myself got vaccinated. Another recent study from The Lancet (Bobrovitz et al., 2023) showed that hybrid immunity, which is the combination of natural and vaccine immunity, is the best way to go in terms of strengthening the immune system. This does not change the fact that natural immunity is as effective, if not more so, than vaccine immunity. It confirms the notion that the choice to vaccinate primarily has individual benefits, not societal ones. It means that vaccine mandates and vaccine passports were unnecessary. You know what else was unnecessary? Threatening people's livelihoods, forbidding travel, or restricting access to various venues because someone was unvaccinated was unnecessary.
Natural immunity is not the only science that the U.S. government has ignored. Last month, a systematic review of randomized control trials (RCT) on face mask efficacy came out from the organization Cochrane. For context, systematic reviews of RCTs are the gold standard of public health research. Cochrane is considered the gold standard organization for carrying out those reviews. Cochrane found that there is zero evidence that face masks work to prevent COVID transmission. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would rather ignore the evidence and stick with her gut feeling.
Public health officials ignoring scientific evidence does not stop with masks. Fauci insisted on school closures in spite of evidence to the contrary. Fauci said that we should never stop implementing a mask mandate on public transit. World leaders pushed for lockdowns in spite of all epidemiological guidance advising against lockdowns. What is infuriating is that government leaders ignored or manipulated scientific findings in order to engender policy outcomes that would placate the COVID hysteria.
Public health policy had an almost exclusive focus on COVID while ignoring non-COVID health costs, as well as economic, social, and psychological costs of COVID policies. Ignoring the science led to these disastrous policy choices, and we are going to live with the consequences for years to come. Most of these policy decisions could have been prevented with foresight, if only public health officials listened to standard epidemiological advice instead of fear and panic.
What is even worse is that public officials continue to cling to faulty conclusions like a pre-modern peasant would have clung to a talisman. Cisneros indicated that the vaccine mandate for soldiers is still in effect. The United States is the only developed country that still recommends masks for anyone over 2 years old. What is so troublesome is that the so-called "experts" they cannot even admit when they are wrong, they cannot evolve their positions as data become more abundantly clear on various facets of public health, and somehow they still have their jobs. These officials undoubtedly eroded trust in public health institutions. If they want that trust to continue eroding, they can double down and continue to provide recommendations that do not have basis in scientific evidence. If they lack the humility to admit they were wrong, my advice from two weeks ago stands: we should ignore the likes of the CDC and enjoy our lives.
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