WASHINGTON – Earlier this month, a conservative radio host Announced by Dennis Prager he contracted the coronavirus. As far as he was concerned, that was good news. The unvaccinated Prager hoped to protect himself from COVID-19 in the old-fashioned way: by getting sick.
“It’s infinitely better to have natural immunity than immunity to vaccines,” Prager said, reiterating an argument against the vaccine repeated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other pro-Trump personalities who turned coronavirus vaccination into a cultural war waged by officials. public health, for example, could extend the pandemic for all.
Prager is wrong, he suggests a new one study published Friday The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which finds that natural immunity offers much weaker protection than a vaccine. A new study finds that people who have had natural immunity due to the recent fight against COVID-19 and who have not been vaccinated are 5.49 times more likely to experience a new COVID-19 infection than people who have been vaccinated. they have not been infected before.
“The data suggest that vaccination can provide a higher, stronger, and more consistent level of immunity to protect people from hospitalization for COVID-19 than just infection for at least 6 months,” the CDC said in a press release.
The new study contradicts Israeli analysis, published in August, hinted to the contrary, as natural immunity seemingly offers greater protection than vaccination.
“Immunity caused by a vaccine is much better than infection and recovery, which some call strangely ‘natural immunity,'” Baylor College of Medicine’s infectious disease specialist, Dr. Peter J. Hotez tweeted on Friday afternoon. “Vaccine groups and far-right groups are ballistic, but that’s the reality.”
This was a reality that public health officials liked to point out, given the continued resistance of some Americans to coronavirus vaccination. “We now have additional evidence that reaffirms the importance of COVID-19 vaccines, even if you have had a previous infection,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement that accompanied the release of the new findings. “This study adds more knowledge to demonstrate the protection of vaccines against severe disease due to COVID-19.”
About 192 million people in the United States have been vaccinated against coronavirus, According to the CDC. This figure represents a 58 percent share of the U.S. population, which most epidemiologists believe is not high enough to prevent community expansion.
The study examined 7,000 patients hospitalized with “COVID-19-like disease” in nine countries in the first nine months of 2021. Some of these patients were vaccinated; Although coronavirus vaccines are extremely good at protecting against hospitalization, they are not perfect, especially when it comes to vulnerable or elderly people.
(The study included only recipients of mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna; the single-dose vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson uses older technology and has been we give much less often in the United States as its mRNA counterparts.)
Unvaccinated subjects in the study group were previously infected with COVID-19 in the six months prior to the second attack, resulting in hospitalization. Only how long natural immunity lasts was another topic of discussion and research, in addition to the strength of this immunity to vaccines.
The developed coronavirus vaccines during the government of Donald Trump, a Republican. But with President Biden, a Democrat, largely overseeing the introduction of vaccines – as well as the implementation of vaccination mandates – some Republicans saw a political benefit in challenging vaccination for ideological reasons.
In doing so, they have used “natural immunity” as an argument. against vaccination. The new findings seem to weaken their case.
Explore how the Delta version relates to the national political landscape in this 3D experience of the Yahoo immersive team.
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