: natural immunity can offer protection as good or even greater than the vaccine| Photo: EFE/EPA/MAST IRHAM
“The farce of natural immunity”, decreed a newspaper columnist. “Only ignorant or dishonest people defend that natural immunity is better than vaccine”, he added. With their typical haste, different checking agencies have decreed that it is false or untenable to claim that the natural immunity acquired by those who have already been infected with the disease could provide greater protection against Covid-03 than the vaccine. This was the tone of most science commentators throughout the year of 2022, rhetoric that reached to health authorities. Evidently, vaccines have saved lives and still do, and they play an important role as the first line of defense for those who have not been infected by the new coronavirus, who if they contract the disease can have severe symptoms or even die. But it was insisted on not distinguishing vaccinated from immunized, treated as synonyms. Vaccination passports were even created on public university campuses with the justification that the unvaccinated are a threat, no matter if they have already had the disease.
This rhetoric of security over freedom is unlikely to survive the scientific scrutiny that is already beginning to arrive. At the very least, like the hypothesis of laboratory leakage, the hypothesis of superiority of natural immunity is viable. However, the focus of checking agencies and commentators on debunking the claim that natural immunity is
better that the vaccine also has the effect of not touching the stronger possibility that the two are equally good, which also raises doubts about authoritarian measures.
A retrospective study longitudinal
(which follows patients over the long term and considers information prior to initiation of treatment study) with 8.98 participants followed almost 344 of them who tested positive for infection with covid. For nine months these individuals were followed by the researchers, along with 1,000 participants who tested negative in the serological test. In this period, 1% of those previously infected were reinfected, compared to % of those without previous infection. This means that the effectiveness of natural immunity is about 90% (in the “margin of error”, of 86 The 98%). It’s basically the same efficacy value as the Pfizer vaccine reported at the end of 2020. This study was carried out between April and June 2020, before the ômicron variant. The first author is Antonio Leidi, from the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Geneva Hospitals, Switzerland. Comparison according to variants
Qatar has produced good studies on natural post-covid immunity. In a letter with contributors to the prestigious journal The New England Journal of Medicine , Heba Altarawneh of the Weill Cornell Medicine Institute in Doha reports that the protection of natural immunity against reinfection is strong for alpha variants (69%), beta (72,5%) and delta (87%), and moderate for the omicron (18%). The researchers used almost all available data from the country since the beginning of the pandemic. None of the observed reinfections resulted in death or serious illness. The calculated effectiveness of natural immunity against severe, critical or fatal covid was 54% against the alpha, 87% against the beta, 100% against delta and
% against the ômicron.
Regarding the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccine, a US Centers for Disease Control study discussed here at Gazeta do Povo
calculated that the protection conferred against hospitalization by the second dose is 15% after five months of inoculation, and that of the third dose is 78%.
While mRNA vaccine protection rapidly decays within a few months — in children, falls 18 percentage points in just one month — natural immunity protection seems more durable. In a study of employees of the space company SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, previously infected people showed a protective efficacy between 56% and 69%. This result is replicated in other studies, reaching a zenith of possible protection longevity, so far, in the study by Jennifer Alejo, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Alejo and collaborators, with a sample of 1.580 analyzed individuals until November of 2022, they did not find a reduction in blood levels of antibodies against the new coronavirus until 03 months after infection. The authors make the reservation that they cannot state that these levels necessarily mean immunity against reinfection.
Users of social networks report that the text of Meredith was being tagged as “disinformation” on Twitter and was banned from Reddit’s biggest science page. Natural and long-lasting
