Natural immunity is real.
Why, then, isn’t this entirely real state of Having Had Covid, and subsequently having developed resistance to the disease, honored as a cause of exemption from Biden’s recent vaccine mandate?
Those who’ve suffered through COVID “enjoy significant long-term immunity from the virus, which is unlikely to be increased by being injected with one of the coronavirus vaccinations now on the market.”
And data from Israel suggests even more:
More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously—that is, less than 1% of the new cases.
Roughly 40% of new cases—or more than 3,000 patients – involved people who had been infected despite being vaccinated.
If desired, the previously infected should be given an exemption from any vaccine mandate—it is unreasonable to govern the American people in any other way. In fact, if the governmental strategy for victory against the virus is to stratify society into classes, able or unable to work, congregate, or go outside on the basis of their supposed immunity, then the above data suggests that the previously infected should receive higher benefits, and greater access to goods and services than both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated; that there should be a three-way split within society, in which the unvaccinated are banned, the vaccinated are masked and distanced, and the previously infected, like the winners of the golden ticket, are welcomed into an inner circle of normal, or at least the Most Normal Possible. Employees should not be fined for employing the previously infected—in fact, they should be rewarded more for employing the previously-infected than for employing the vaccinated.
If we are happy to mandate a class binary at the heart of all customary American life, why would we resist a triple-tiered hierarchical response to the crisis, given the real presence of triple-tiered immunity in the American people?
One possible reason might be the fear that honoring natural immunity will not inspire the unvaccinated, never-infected crowd to get their shot. After all, if natural immunity is an apparent ticket out, won’t people simply wait to get the disease? Try to get it, even?
Perhaps they will. By definition, the unvaccinated are not very frightened about getting COVID. But then Biden and Co. should be honest about what they are doing by ignoring natural immunity. They are being unjust to about 40.7 million Americans (previously infected) in a bid to provoke an unknown portion of 93 million Americans (unvaccinated) to get a less efficient protection than they would otherwise get. This is not a reasonable act. This is a father who gives his daughter a chickenpox vaccine after she catches chickenpox, as a way of showing her brother that getting chickenpox is no way out of getting the vaccine.
Such behavior, in parents, would be psychopathic.
To this point, some might argue that vaccinating the previously infected cannot do any harm—that they might as well get vaccinated. Ignoring the obvious rebuttal that we are not even close to knowing, with any sort of confidence, that vaccinating the previously infected is a merely neutral act, having had nothing close to the time necessary to observe the effects—still, the mandating of neutral acts is not itself neutral. If Biden told all the previously infected to jump on one foot every Wednesday morning, this would do no particular harm to their physical health—beyond the odd Wednesday morning fall, one imagines. But to obey an unreasonable dictate, however negligible, is morally degrading. It doesn’t do a dog any harm to roll over, even if there is no particular reason to command him to do so—but human beings are not dogs. “Human dignity” does not mean that one should not have to obey laws. No one but libertarians think that it does—and libertarians hardly think at all. But “human dignity” does mean that one should only obey laws as human beings, not as dogs; that is, insofar as the law is reasonably promulgated for the sake of the common good, such that a free, reasonable human being can understand how the law is for his own good and the good of the whole, and assent to it.
Obviously, vaccinating the previously infected is a step up from ordering them to jump on one foot—but not a very high step. It is unnecessary to force the previously infected, and therefore naturally immune, to become vaccinated, and it is only dubiously helpful in cajoling the unvaccinated to get vaccinated. It does not serve the common good. All it does is condemn one member of the American body to unnecessary treatment in the hopes of frightening another member into getting treated.
This is the real trouble with leaving natural immunity out of the discussion: it renders the supposed goal of the vaccine mandate suspect. The goal, presumably, is that we create a population of people immune to the coronavirus. The naturally immune have already achieved the goal. To force those who achieved the goal to keep playing the game strongly suggests that the goal isn’t really the goal, but that, in fact, the game is the goal. Precisely because of the lack of exemption for the naturally immune, Biden’s mandate makes it look like vaccination and subsequent booster-shotting, rather than the health of the community, is the actual goal of the regime.
No one wants to be backed into conspiratorial positions. It is tiresome, to say the least, to live in a state of fundamental suspicion, always presuming that the stated goals and motivation of our authorities are lies, and that the fundamental meaning of American citizenship is the esoteric discerning of whatever true goals and motivations are hidden behind them. But it is quite natural to be suspicious when laws are handed down, ostensibly for the sake of producing immunity, which obviously cannot have health or immunity as their purpose.
There is nothing more boring than the cry to “follow the money.” But it’s a cry that seems eminently more reasonable when one’s government ignores an immunity that costs nothing and mandates an arguably less-effective immunity that further enriches the wealthy.
It is a pseudo-intellectual, right-wing talking point to argue that tyrannical governments deliberately instill conflict within their populations, mobilizing a majority against a common enemy in order to distract from the fact that they are ruling for personal gain. But even the most deranged spouting begins to ring with plausibility when our government insists on a categorical divide between a vaccinated majority and an unvaccinated minority, blaming the woes of the former on the irresponsibility of the latter, while pretending a third category of immunity simply does not exist. Obviously, it is more difficult to successfully divide the nation into an Us versus Them if the category of Them can be further subdivided into a Them Who Is Immune Like Us, and a Them Who is Not Immune Yet. If there are Good Communists and Bad Communists, it’s hard to run on the Anti-Communist ticket. By pretending that there are only the Bad Unvaccinated, the Biden mandate lends itself to the most mundane suspicion imaginable: that the man is fighting to win voters, not to eliminate a disease.
This production of easy enmity, rather than the end of the pandemic, seems a lot more like the goal of the Biden mandate once one imagines what its enforcement would look like. Will the National Guard be called on the inevitable percentage of red state businesses that do not comply? There will be fines on employers, but how will the Feds know that they are telling the truth? How are the employers supposed to guarantee the truth-telling of their employees? Rather than being given as a part of the law, the mechanism by which the law will be enforced is yet to be determined, which rather makes one wonder—once again—if health is the true goal of the law. For “health,” presumably, would be achieved by the actual enforcement of vaccination as “road safety” is achieved by the actual deployment of state troopers. A law written for the sake of ending a pandemic through a vaccine would put enforcement at the forefront, detailing how the needle ends up in the arm of the unvaccinated, and how they will be prevented from weaseling out. As it stands, the law succeeds at designating the unvaccinated and their benefactors as social contagions, criminal, unclean, and To Blame, but fails to show any vigorous mechanism for making them otherwise. The unvaccinated are named as the source of the pandemic, and yet, the end of this Pandemic of the Unvaccinated has been staked on some employers’ fear of eminently contestable and cheatable fines.
Finally, it is a rather tortuous theological take to argue that our leaders are possessed with such an adoration of the man-made and such a disdain for nature that they value a new technology over any natural achievement of the human body. But the utter silence concerning the value of the naturally immune body, even as talk of the necessity of third, fourth, and even annual booster shots becomes commonplace, makes the theological blowhard look far more reasonable than he deserves. It would certainly explain an absurd gap in our response to the crisis—that our leaders hold an unspoken conviction that all effective solutions can only come from the intervention of man and his many devices, never creation as it is given.
All of these suspicions could slow, rather than quicken, the impulse to get vaccinated. As a Catholic, I have been taught from my youth that an unjust law is no law at all. Participation in unreason, even if it does no obvious, individual harm, is participation in the construction of an unreasonable social order, in which men act more like beasts than children of God; in which people become habituated to acting for fear of punishment, rather than for the pursuit of the common good. It is quite true that Catholics are allowed to obey the letter of the Biden mandate and get vaccinated. But the spirit of the Biden mandate is scandalous in its total lack of acknowledgement of natural immunity and those who possess it. This is a stumbling block to those who might otherwise get vaccinated, stirring in them the reasonable suspicion that the intent of their lawgivers is not the health of their neighbors, but something else.
UPDATE 9/13/2021
There are a few responses to this argument that merit more discussion.
The first is simply the question of whether natural immunity is durable: If it fades away after a short amount of time, shouldn’t vaccines be mandated to those who have recovered from COVID? The answer to this is simply that natural immunity has been shown to be more durable than the immunity provided by vaccines. A review of the available research, entitled, Quantifying the risk of SARS‐CoV‐2 reinfection over time (nih.gov), found that “[r]einfection was an uncommon event (absolute rate 0%–1.1%), with no study reporting an increase in the risk of reinfection over time…These data suggest that naturally acquired SARS‐CoV‐2 immunity does not wane for at least 10 months post‐infection.” Obviously, this number will change as time stretches on, either persisting or diminishing. Vaccines, for their part, have a decreasing durability requiring boosters, as in the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines, which slip to 84% efficacy after six months.
The second argument is that vaccinating the previously infected may actually increase one’s natural immunity, thereby giving some necessity to vaccinating the previously infected, and justifying the Biden Mandate’s exclusion of any exemption for natural immunity. As far as we can tell, this increase is negligible. The largest population study to address the question found that the previously infected went from 99.74% immunity before vaccination to only 99.86% immunity.
Lastly, there is the question of whether or not natural immunity provides the necessary protection from COVID variants, as compared to the vaccines. So far, it does appear to. The above study from Israel found that the “Delta variant was 27 times more likely to break through Pfizer protection from January-February and cause symptoms than it was to penetrate natural immunity from the same period."