This is the second of an extensive series of articles about natural immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2 and how it compares to the immunity induced by COVID‑19 vaccines. Links to each installment of the series will be compiled on this overview page as they are published. I highly recommend that you be sure to have read prior installments to get the most out of this one.
Anyone who believes the information that has been propagated by the public health establishment about COVID‑19 would have to be forgiven for concluding that natural immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, is weak and short-lived—if it exists at all—and that people who’ve already recovered from infection need to get vaccinated to acquire sufficient immunity.
For example, when I did a Google search for information about immunity to this coronavirus on July 1, 2021, one of the top results that appeared was a page from the leading healthcare website WebMD titled “Coronavirus Immunity and Reinfection”, which grossly misinforms readers about natural immunity.
The first thing that WebMD says about immunity to the coronavirus is that “Vaccinations are the best option to developing immunity against the new coronavirus.” That proclamation is immediately followed by a sentence implying that natural immunity may not exist at all: there is merely “hope” that people who recover from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection might “also develop an immunity to it.”
Reinforcing the message, WebMD says, “It’s possible that people who’ve had COVID‑19 can get sick again—and maybe infect other people.” Although it is no less true that people who’ve been vaccinated can get COVID‑19 and maybe transmit the virus to other people, WebMD does not acknowledge this possibility for vaccinated individuals—thus leaving readers with the false impression that vaccine-conferred immunity is vastly superior.
Taking the deception further, a subheading in the article asks the question: “If You’ve Had COVID‑19, Are You Immune?” In answer to that question, WebMD lies that “Health experts don’t know whether we really become immune to COVID‑19 after we’re infected. And if we do have immunity, we don’t know how long it might last.” (Emphasis added.)
WebMD further deceives that, while most people who recover from infection develop antibodies to the virus, “there’s no evidence that this will protect them if they’re exposed to it again.” When it comes to the antibodies induced by COVID‑19 vaccines, on the other hand, WebMD harbors no such doubts.
If there were little to no natural immunity, of course, it would mean that population or “herd” immunity to SARS-CoV-2, whereby a low rate of transmission is achieved because it becomes increasingly difficult for the virus to find susceptible hosts, could not be naturally attained. By casting doubt on the very existence of natural immunity, WebMD implies that natural herd immunity is unobtainable. Again deceitfully suggesting that vaccines confer superior immunity, WebMD asserts with respect to herd immunity that it is “vaccines”—and only vaccines—that “should help eventually achieve that goal.”[1]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has similarly been propagating the message that natural immunity is weak and possibly short-lived in furtherance of the policy goal of attaining high uptake of COVID‑19 vaccines.
Additionally, the mass vaccination campaign has been tied to authoritarian “lockdown” measures that have been implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which we were told from the start needed to remain in place to one extent or another until a vaccine came along to save us. The public message has been that you can get your freedom back once you are fully vaccinated.
On March 8, 2021, the CDC updated its “Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People” webpage to start telling the public that fully vaccinated people could visit with others who were also fully vaccinated or with unvaccinated people from a single low-risk household and without needing to wear a facemask or to maintain social distancing.[2]
A New York Times headline on March 8 celebrated that vaccinated Americans could now “Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin”! CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky was quoted as saying, “As more Americans are vaccinated, a growing body of evidence now tells us that there are some activities that fully vaccinated people can resume at low risk to themselves.” Walensky was not quoted as saying that people who had already acquired natural immunity could also begin resuming their normal lives.[3]
So why have public health officials in issuing their guidelines pretended as though natural immunity doesn’t exist? There is an obvious political agenda being served. In fact, we have been explicitly told by its advocates what that political agenda is.
A few days after the CDC issued its updated guidance on March 8, Leana Wen, MD, a former Baltimore health commissioner, contributing writer for the Washington Post, and CNN medical analyst, explained on CNN that, for people who hadn’t been persuaded yet to accept vaccination, “we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life.”
Dr. Wen expressed deep concern that, with states already having begun to drop lockdown measures and open society up, “the window to do that is really narrowing.” As she elucidated (emphasis added):
We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all the freedoms that you have.” Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.[4]
Dr. Wen was not telling the CDC anything it didn’t already know. The CDC fully appreciated the need to use lockdown measures to coerce people into accepting an experimental COVID‑19 vaccine. The same day the CDC updated its guidance for fully vaccinated people, it published a “Science Brief” that proposed, “Taking steps towards relaxing certain measures for vaccinated people may help improve COVID‑19 vaccine acceptance and uptake.” There was no suggestion to relax measures for naturally immune people.[5]
The CDC’s suggestion that authoritarian policies could be used to coerce the population into accepting vaccination was implemented by the state government here in Michigan, where I am writing from, under the governorship of Gretchen Whitmer. Her administration unveiled a policy on April 29, 2021, explicitly tying the easing of restrictions to vaccine uptake, calling it the “Plan to Get ‘MI Vacc to Normal”.[6]
On May 13, the CDC started telling people on a webpage titled “When You’ve Been Fully Vaccinated” that “If you are fully vaccinated, you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.” The advice for everyone else, including those with natural immunity, was “If you haven’t been vaccinated yet, find a vaccine.”[7]
On May 28, the CDC’s “Interim Public Health Recommendations” page was similarly updated to say that with the approval of state governments, “fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing”. Once again, there was no allowance made for individuals with natural immunity.[8]
When the CDC’s guidance was updated on May 13, a coordinated effort was made to get the message out loud and clear to the public that getting vaccinated was the only way to regain freedom. On Twitter, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky posted, “If you are fully vaccinated against #COVID19, you can now start doing things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”[9]
Also taking to Twitter, President Joseph R. Biden threatened, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours.” That order went for naturally immune people, too.[10]
There were no CDC webpages titled “When You’ve Recovered from Infection” or “Interim Public Health Recommendations for People with Natural Immunity” and no pronouncements from the CDC or the White House telling naturally immune people that they had the government’s permission to resume activities without wearing a mask or observing social distancing guidelines. People with natural immunity, too, were to have their liberty curtailed until they accepted vaccination.
This wasn’t extreme enough, though, for Dr. Wen, who criticized the CDC in a Washington Post article for advising fully vaccinated people to resume their normal lives without first ensuring that there was a system in place to enforce lockdown measures discriminately against individuals who were not fully vaccinated. Dr. Wen, like the CDC and the White House, made no allowances for people with natural immunity.
Prior to the CDC’s May 13 policy update, Dr. Wen was criticizing the CDC for maintaining that vaccinated people should continue to wear masks and follow other lockdown measures, just like everyone else. “I saw little incentive,” Wen complained, “for people to be vaccinated against COVID‑19 if they had to keep wearing masks, avoiding gatherings and refraining from nonessential travel.”
When the policy update came, she said it “would be very welcome if not for one big problem: There is no concurrent requirement for proof of vaccination.” As she candidly elaborated:
By resorting to the honor code, the CDC is removing a critical incentive to vaccination. Many who were on the fence might have been motivated to get the shot because they could go back to activities they were missing, without a mask. Now, if no one is checking, and they can do everything anyway, why bother?[11]
In other words, since so many people understood that the risk to them from SARS‑CoV‑2 was so low and the benefit of a risk-carrying experimental vaccination so questionable, without the government resorting to extreme coercion, they just would not behave according to the wishes of policymakers.
The Whitmer administration in Michigan was totally on board with the use of coercion. Citing the CDC’s updated guidance, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services issued an updated order requiring continued use of face masks for anyone who wasn’t fully vaccinated, with no exception for people who were already naturally immune.[12]
As another example of the official ignorance of natural immunity, the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on June 10 updated its “Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID‑19 in the Workplace” to exempt vaccinated individuals from behavioral restrictions. No similar allowances were made for naturally immune people, which omission was in accordance with the overriding goal declared at the top of the webpage to “Encourage COVID‑19 vaccination”.[13]
The World Health Organization (WHO) has similarly been pretending as though natural immunity were insufficient and inferior to the immunity conferred by COVID‑19 vaccines. “We still recommend that if you’ve had COVID disease,” said the WHO on March 28, 2021, “you should still get the full course of the vaccines that are out there and available to you.”[14]
Earlier, the WHO had attempted to deny the very existence of natural immunity. Until mid-November of last year, on a question-and-answer page of its website, the WHO described “herd immunity” as “the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”[15] But on November 13, 2020, the WHO updated that page of its website to suggest that people with natural immunity do not contribute to herd immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2. The WHO now defined herd immunity as “a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.”[16]
After a public outcry denouncing the organization for such an unscientific and obviously political move, the WHO relented and reverted its explanation of herd immunity back to acknowledging that natural immunity is real.[17]
On July 1, 2021, I saw Twitter joining in to promote the message that “People who have recovered from COVID‑19 should get fully vaccinated, according to medical experts”. To support that unsolicited medical advice, Twitter cited the policy positions of the CDC and the WHO.[18]
Instructively, the public health establishment is telling people who’ve already recovered from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection that they should still get vaccinated despite the fact that a history of prior infection was an exclusion criterion for the COVID‑19 vaccine clinical trials used to obtain emergency use authorization from FDA.[19]
In sum, before we even begin to examine what science really tells us about the subject, it should be perfectly obvious to any free-thinking individual that the “experts” and “authorities” are more concerned with creating demand for these pharmaceutical products than with educating people to be able to make an informed choice about whether to get a COVID‑19 vaccine.
[1] “Coronavirus Immunity and Reinfection”, WebMD, reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MD, on April 19, 2021, accessed on July 1, 2021, and again on August 30, 2021, https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-immunity-reinfection; page one archived athttps://web.archive.org/web/20210830132052/https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-immunity-reinfection; page two archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210830132052/https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-immunity-reinfection.
[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People”, CDC.gov, updated March 8, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210308165302/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated-guidance.html.
[3] Roni Caryn Rabin, “Vaccinated Americans, Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin (but Start Small)”, New York Times, March 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/health/coronavirus-cdc-vaccinated-guidelines.html.
[4] Leana Wen, MD, “I’m very concerned”, Twitter, March 12, 2021, https://twitter.com/DrLeanaWen/status/1370527455975505920.
[5] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Science Brief: Background Rationale and Evidence for Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People”, CDC.gov, updated March 8, 2021, archived on March 26, 2021 at https://web.archive.org/web/20210326123341/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html.
[6] Office of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, “Governor Whitmer Unveils Plan to Get ‘MI Vacc to Normal’”, Michigan.gov, April 29, 2021, accessed July 1, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210701214447/https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/0,9309,7-387-90499_90640-558091–,00.html.
[7] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “When You’ve Been Fully Vaccinated”, CDC.gov, updated May 13, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210515000647/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated.html.
[8] CDC, “Interim Public Health Recommendations”, updated May 28, 2021, accessed July 1, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210701211201/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated-guidance.html.
[9] Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, “If you are fully vaccinated”, Twitter, May 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/CDCDirector/status/1392954810111045639.
[10] President Biden, “The rule is now simple”, Twitter, May 13, 2021, https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1392935847863934987.
[11] Leana S. Wen, “The CDC shouldn’t have removed restrictions without requiring proof of vaccination”, Washington Post, May 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/13/cdc-mask-rules-vaccination-leana-wen/.
[12] Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, “Gatherings and Face Mask Order”, Michigan.gov, May 15, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210701221355/https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_98455-559589–,00.html.
[13] Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID‑19 in the Workplace”, OSHA.gov, updated June 10, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210701222804/https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/safework.
[14] World Health Organization, “If you have already had #COVID19 do you still need both doses of the vaccine?” Twitter, March 28, 2021, https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1376262257483603973.
[15] World Health Organization, “Coronavirus disease (COVID‑19): Serology”, WHO.int, updated June 9, 2020, archived on November 12, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201112033233/https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-serology.
[16] WHO, “Coronavirus disease”, WHO.int, updated November 13, 2020, archived on November14, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201114155111/https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-serology.
[17] WHO, “Coronavirus disease”, WHO.int, updated December 31, 2020, archived on July 1, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210701225223/https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-serology. Jeffrey A. Tucker, “WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website”, American Institute for Economic Research”, December 23, 2020, https://www.aier.org/article/who-deletes-naturally-acquired-immunity-from-its-website/.
[18] “People who have recovered from COVID‑19 should get fully vaccinated, according to medical experts”, Twitter, accessed July 1, 2021, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210701225944/https://twitter.com/i/events/1403058860722593792.
[19] Catherine J. Reynolds et al., “Prior SARS-CoV-2 infection rescues B and T cell responses to variants after first vaccine dose”, Science, published online on April 30, 2021, and in print on June 25, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abh1282. Marie I. Samanovic et al., “Poor antigen-specific responses to the second BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine dose in SARS-CoV-2-experienced individuals”, medRxiv, February 9, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.07.21251311.
This is a pretty horrifying situation. We need to get the populace onboard. For that we need explicit unarguable facts such as the absolute risks of extreme adverse covid events with/without vaccinations and at various ages for a minimum.
Figures that are getting perhaps increasingly hard to get but nevertheless they still need to be got out.
I try hard to find them because I’m a believer in all this but I find it hard. So how about the others folks, the majority?
My basic belief is that our absolute risk/chance of AVOIDING is about 99.86% as posited by Pfizer’s stats in its report on its study as shown by Dr Chris Martensen on youtube and at best an improvement on that figure claimed by Pfizer to 99.96% i.e. a 0.1% improvement.
Figures that must be horribly in doubt everywhere now with multiple vaccinations etc.
But nevertheless that’s what we need to present to the people and try to sway their opinions. Their understanding.
Something as clear as those percentages. ‘You are 99.86% safe as you are.’
Then followed by established, proveable figures on actual mortalities related to expected mortalities. i.e. excess deaths establishing which can be definitely slated to Covid and covid alone.
It’s my general belief that essentially it now seems there’s been over the last few years, when taken together, virtually no excess death at all.
i.e. the whole thing is a pipe dream.
If I’m wrong then I need to see the real figures.
And this is what I need for ammunition to give the unbelievers:
Absolute risk.
Actual historical lethality of the thing.
And then: piled on top of that best figures for risks and established injuries and deaths from the vaccines.
Triple whammy: people’s real danger; what’s really happened; what vaccines represent.
What we really need is data from randomized, placebo-controlled trials comparing long-term health effects, including all-cause mortality, between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Unfortunately, we will never have that data since they have vaccinated away the control group in clinical trials.