Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

he science on the efficacy and durability of natural immunity is now overwhelming. Yet the CDC continues to recommend lifting restrictions on the vaccinated but not those who have recovered from Covid and have superior natural immunity. Vaccine mandates across the country likewise ignore natural immunity simply because the CDC is ignoring it. Those promulgating vaccine mandates feel no need to actually address the science on this question; instead, they simply fall back on the CDC’s recommendation that everyone—regardless of immunity status—get vaccinated.

There are many political reasons the CDC continues to ignore the scientific evidence on this issue. Here is a sampling of the reasons, which are neither compelling nor grounded in scientific findings

Public health officials worry that acknowledging natural immunity will lead people to deliberately try to get infected with Covid rather than getting vaccinated. The obvious response to this worry is that the natural immunity question is not about whether people should try to acquire natural immunity by deliberately getting infected; nobody is suggesting this. It is about the level of immunity afforded to those who have already recovered from Covid as compared to immunity from the vaccine.

If the CDC got back to epidemiological basics and finally did these essential studies, most scientists estimate that somewhere between 50% and 60% of the population will turn out to have natural immunity, including many who were vaccinated (which artificially elevates estimates of vaccine efficacy, by the way). In the mind of officials who never want to admit that they may have been wrong, this will suggest that—despite draconian lockdowns, social distancing, masking, scrubbing of surfaces, etc.—the virus nevertheless did what viruses do: over half of Americans got infected anyways.

Self-interested public health agencies will see this as bad news. (The silver lining is that, of this huge number of people who have been infected with Covid, 99.8% will have survived, including 99.9996% of those under 50.)