By Frederico Links
ANTI-VACCINE PROPAGANDISTS will latch on to anything to try and persuade people not to get vaccinated.
The latest attempts involve spreading narratives about the human immune system being much more capable of fending off Covid-19 than vaccines.
At the heart of many of these misleading natural immunity narratives, which have gone global, are claims about an Israeli study, the results of which were published in August this year.
The study has not been peer reviewed yet, so caution is encouraged.
A recent post on a social media page dedicated to spreading anti-vaccine content raised the issue by asking the following questions: “Why do institutions force people to get vaccinated even if they had the disease and have natural immunity? Why are more and more studies coming out that natural immunity against the disease is much stronger than the vacciness
It is true that the Israeli study “demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalisation caused by the Delta variant of Sars-CoV-2, compared to the (Pfizer BioNTech) two-dose vaccine-induced immunity”.
However, it also found that individuals “who were both previously infected with Sars-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant”.
A late August report on the study in Science magazine notes that “the researchers compared more than 14 000 people who had a confirmed Sars-CoV-2 infection and were still unvaccinated with an equivalent number of previously infected people who received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The team found that the unvaccinated group was twice as likely to be reinfected as the singly vaccinated”.
In other words, the Israeli study found that people who had a previous Covid-19 infection and were then vaccinated with a single vaccine dose had much higher immunity against the Delta variant than those who had a previous infection and were not vaccinated.
So, even though natural immunity is much higher and better after Covid-19 infection than from a vaccine, vaccines greatly enhance and strengthen that immunity.
That is why some countries, including Israel, Germany and France, encourage the previously infected to get at least one dose of a vaccine.
The expert view is that relying on natural immunity when you have not had a Covid-19 infection and is unvaccinated is irresponsible.
The same is true for those who have previously been infected, but do not get vaccinated because they believe they can no longer get infected.
As vaccine scientist and professor of molecular virology Peter Hotez states in a Twitter feed on the topic on 28 September: “Individuals who become infected with Covid-19 and recover exhibit highly variable levels of protective immunity versus reinfection. Some have protection, others very little or none. If you have been infected and have recovered, it’s still important for you to get vaccinated.”
On the whole, the idea some people have that their immune system, without previous exposure to Covid-19, is strong enough to repel the Delta variant “is not a good idea”, says infectious disease expert Anna Durbin of the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the United States.
“Yes, natural infection does provide some immunity, so the next time you get that disease, you won’t get as sick,” Durbin states in an online article.
“But here’s the problem: Your first encounter with that disease could go very wrong. With Covid-19, you could end up very ill, you could end up in the hospital, or you could die.”
– Frederico Links is the editor of Namibia Fact Check, a project of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Namibia Fact Check can be viewed at www.namibiafactcheck.org.na
Read the original article on Namibian.
