In May, India was in trouble: there were more than 4,000 deaths daily and more than 390,000 new cases of Covid-19 confirmed per day. The health care system has collapsed. It is estimated that, in all, up to 4.6 million people died in the country as a result of the pandemic. The delta variant was called the “Indian variant” until the WHO successfully changed its name. The country turned the tables in the following weeks dramatically. The confirmed-case curve has dropped so sharply that in just two weeks it has returned to pre-delta levels.
How did India get it? Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who disappeared from the public scene in May, is now all smiles and celebrates a billion people vaccinated. But vaccines cannot explain the phenomenon: most of the fall in cases happened when the Indian population had not reached 10% of those vaccinated. Now, only a quarter of the population has two doses, although more than half have had at least one. The magazine The Economist offers his conclusion: it is not that India fought the pandemic. “The simple fact, instead, is that Covid-19 fought India.”
More than 90% of Indians in New Delhi have antibodies against COVID-19. This is above the estimated numbers for achieving herd immunity. Indians are protected in the first place by natural immunity. India’s case seems to be replicated in Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Together, these countries include the population of more than a quarter of humanity.
Natural immunity compared to vaccine immunity
It is healthy to understand that natural immunity, if superior to that conferred by vaccines (a distinction made by the US Centers for Disease Control), does not do this because it is “natural”. We must not fall into the fallacy that something is good because it is natural: nature has an abundance of counterexamples.
In one of the studies on natural immunity, compared to mRNA vaccines, what attracted the most attention was the pre-press of Israeli Sivan Gazit and his colleagues, who used a sample of 46,000 patients during an outbreak of the delta variant. They found that naturally immune ones are eight to 21 times more resistant to the delta variant than vaccinated ones.
Natural immunity lasts longer and provides more protection than vaccines, but the authors think that a dozen of the vaccine may provide an increase in protection for natural immunity, although they could not conclude this with their sample. The study remains without formal review, but we have the informal one: Andrew Gelman, Columbia University, professor of statistics, it says who sees “no statistical reason to question the claims” of the study, but laments that only 5% of those included were over 60, one of the most sensitive groups to the disease.
Both natural immunity and that conferred by vaccines diminish over time. A study of Qatar from Laith J. Abu-Raddad and colleagues, followed 43,000 people who had Covid-19 and found that seven months after the disease the protection against reinfection was 95%. Scientists expect this protection to last even longer than that. Other studies extend the term of high protection to ten months.
Last week the medical journal The Lancet published a review of studies about natural immunity. The pattern in study after study is that the protection afforded after recovery from illness is high and long-lasting, although it is too early to say how long it lasts. In the case of measles, protection is very long, perhaps lifelong. In the case of flu, it is temporary, especially because of the speed at which the virus mutates and evolves.
The human illness caused by a virus most similar to the pandemic was the 2002 Asian flu. One study indicates that people who had this illness continue to have an immune response 17 years later. Furthermore, natural immunity against one variant of the new coronavirus appears to extend well to other variants. The review is frank about possible side effects of the mRNA vaccine, states that “some people who have recovered from Covid-19 may not benefit from vaccination,” and warns that a study indicates that this vaccine may be associated with more effects. adverse effects when administered to those with natural immunity.
It makes no sense to prescribe the infection, however, what show the most promising results is that mandatory vaccination is irrational and a potential waste of money and even health risk in those who have already recovered from the disease. The future of Covid-19 is that it will go from pandemic to endemic — we will live with the disease just as we live with colds and flu.
The CDC fiasco
Even with much of this literature already available, the US Centers for Disease Control decided to publish an article claiming that the protection of the vaccine is superior to natural immunity. The sample was smaller than those in the above studies. The group of patients was not generalizable to the rest of the population, as they were already hospitalized. The study was received with skepticism of experts, but enthusiasm from CNN.
On a hearing in the US Senate, Senator Bill Cassidy questioned CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. “If we don’t know if natural immunity provides protection against future infection, it’s because we decided not to look. Because I hear we have a cohort of people who’ve been infected before. Why didn’t we do this research?” Not answering the question, Walensky said that “our current position after reviewing 96 studies on this question is that everyone who has been infected before should be vaccinated.” Walensky has also been an advocate of mRNA vaccines for children and adolescents.
In Switzerland, citizens who prove that they have recovered from COVID-19 in the past 12 months are considered by the government as protected, with the same status as those vaccinated.
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