Dr. Marty Makary has been a voice of clarity and sanity in the Covid pandemic response, and his latest piece in The Wall Street Journal may be his most important yet.
He writes in “The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid” that “Public-health officials ruined many lives by insisting that workers with natural immunity to Covid-19 be fired if they weren’t fully vaccinated.
“But after two years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear. By firing staff with natural immunity, employers got rid of those least likely to infect others.
“It’s time to reinstate those employees with an apology.”
Halleluiah!
The Centers for Disease Control has resisted information about natural immunity lest it discourage people from getting the Covid vaccines. But when it finally released data from New York and California last week, it showed that “By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.”
Natural immunity was nearly three times as effective in preventing hospitalization and three to five times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.
The efficacy of the vaccines has waned with new Covid variants, and the National Institutes of Health have “dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown,” insisting that people who’ve had Covid still should get the shots.
So Dr. Makary and colleagues at Johns Hopkins did their own study. “We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant,” he reports.
“The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness.
“Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. They used the wrong starting hypothesis, ignored contrary preliminary data, and dug in as more evidence emerged that called their position into question,” Makary writes.
“Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders.”
The damage to health, health care facilities, and livelihoods is incalculable.
Dr. Makary says that “public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.”
The Supreme Court gave employees of companies with 100 or more workers a break with its decision against the OSHA vaccine mandate. But employees of health care facilities are still subject to the mandate, with all of the consequent calamity.
We’ve seen crazy decisions by hospitals requiring vaccinated health care workers with “mild to moderate” Covid symptoms to return to work to fill in for fired unvaccinated workers who have more protective natural immunity.
“Politicians and public-health officials owe an apology to Americans who lost their jobs on the false premises that only unvaccinated people could spread the virus and only vaccination could prevent its spread.
“Soldiers who have been dishonorably discharged should be restored their rank. Teachers, first responders, and others who have been denied their livelihood should be reinstated. Everyone is essential,” Makary writes.
It’s vital that we listen to the doctors, not to politicians and discredited public health officials!
