Researchers continue to grapple with questions over value of vaccines versus natural immunity
In the United States, everyone, 16 years of age and older, is now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine.
HealthCare.gov, the agency behind the Affordable Care Act, recently sent out an email announcing the “good news.” They said the new shot was “an important tool to help end the pandemic, and it’s your best protection from getting COVID-19.”
But is it really the best?
An alternative form of immune security hardly gets any attention, but it may have benefits that any one of the COVID shots now available under emergency use authorization do not. And many of us may already carry this protection, no shot required.
Natural immunity (the inborn process of catching a virus and recovering from it) has been common knowledge for many years. The process has also shown to produce significant antibody protection against COVID-19. According to research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in January in the journal Science, the immune systems of “more than 95 percent of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection.”
Symptoms don’t have to be severe for protection to be strong. One study screened individuals who had recovered from a mild case of COVID-19 and found that immune “cells not only persist but continuously differentiate in a coordinated fashion well into convalescence, into a state characteristic of long-lived, self-renewing memory.”
But is it better than a vaccination? One study from Denmark doesn’t think so. It suggests that vaccine-induced immunity for COVID-19 may perform slightly better than natural immunity, which was found to prevent reinfection about 80 percent of the time (compare that to the 95 percent effectiveness that vaccine makers claim).
Read full story here: Article Source: Natural Immunity: Public Health’s Forgotten Ally