Natural immunity missing from the conversation about COVID-19

Why isn’t natural immunity from the novel coronavirus — which numerous medical experts and studies suggest is longer-lasting and stronger than vaccine-generated protection — part of the prevailing COVID-19 discussion? A George Mason University law professor and a Parisbased Canadian journalist would like to know.

Professor Todd Zywicki is objecting to his school’s mandatory vaccine policy for faculty and students as a condition for returning to the Northern Virginia campus.

Zywicki is raising an issue that is largely being ignored by the government and the mainstream media in their push for mandatory vaccines: the millions of people with natural antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group has filed a complaint in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of Zywicki.

“George Mason University’s arbitrary, irrational, and unscientific policy forces our client, a tenured law school professor who has devoted his life to serving his community and his country, to ignore the medical advice of his own doctor. … GMU’s attempt to interfere with Professor Zywicki’s bodily autonomy, with no legitimate rationale for doing so, not only violates medical ethics, but also fundamental rights protected in the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution,” states Jenin Younes, NCLA litigation counsel.

The professor recovered from the coronavirus and says that tests confirm that he has antibodies. He does not want to take the vaccine and risk complications or a bad reaction. (Incidentally, there is a page on Facebook where people tell harrowing stories of negative and sometimes fatal reactions they or their loved ones have had to the vaccines. Facebook intermittently takes the page down, but it has/had tens of thousands of followers.)

Zywicki has a letter from his doctor who advised against the shot. He also has a joint statement of support from Dr Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical Center.

They note that “the existing clinical literature overwhelmingly indicates that the protection afforded to the individual and community from natural immunity is as effective and durable as the efficacy levels of the most effective vaccines to date”.

Many in the media have portrayed “the unvaccinated” as ignorant. A large part of the problem is that honest, open, transparent medical debates are often censored by the ridiculously arbitrary policies of social media companies.

However, tens of millions of people have recovered from the virus and may be arriving at the same conclusion that Zywicki has.

A January study partly funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (of which Dr Anthony Fauci is the director) and the National Cancer Institute, published in Science Magazine, found that “the immune systems of more than 95 percent of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection”.

“Several months ago, our studies showed that natural infection induced a strong response, and this study now shows that the responses last,” said Dr Daniela Weiskopf of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, one of three doctors conducting the research. “We are hopeful that a similar pattern of responses lasting over time will also emerge for the vaccine-induced responses.”

According to data from the John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, as of Thursday morning, 35,335,990 people have been infected with the coronavirus in the US, and 614,815 have died.

That means around 34.7 million Americans likely have some degree of natural immunity.

On Monday, the White House announced that 70 percent of Americans have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Seventy percent of the approximate US population of 330 million is 231 million. Combine the number of those who have been vaccinated and those who have survived the vaccine, the likely number of people who have some form of protection is around 80 percent.

The numbers being bandied about for herd immunity range from 70 to 85 percent, albeit they have shifted some with the emergence of the “highly transmissible” Delta variant of this highly politicized virus.

But as that number rises, we are seeing a doubling down of efforts to mandate vaccines along with some outrageous directives in places like New York City — which is barring unvaccinated people from gyms, indoor dining and entertainment venues — by a mayor who has five months left in office.

Other virtual-signaling companies and establishments are following the reactionary, bullheaded initiative, leaving many people to choose between their health or their job. The onerous restrictions also coincide with numerous reports of vaccinated people contracting the virus, as evidenced by recent large outbreaks in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at two hospitals in San Francisco.

And while the world has seen a new surge in cases attributed to the Delta variant, the COVID mortality rate is not what it was before the vaccines arrived or before millions of people acquired natural immunity.

Consider the recent dilemma of Paris-based journalist Rachel Marsden, denied entry into her home country of Canada.

“I went home to visit my mother. Canada tried to force me into a COVID detention facility threatening fines and police action as they don’t recognize my natural immunity,” she wrote in an op-ed on rt.com.

Marsden said her doctor advised against the vaccine because she has a high level of lab-tested antibodies that have yet to drop several months later.

“To protect and preserve my acquired immunity by opting out of vaccination that risks interfering with it or causing a risk to my health, France now requires me to succumb to nasal-swab antigen tests every 48 hours if I wish to continue accessing everyday venues like public transit, gyms, restaurants, some shopping malls and bars. But it’s a price that I’m willing to pay for my health.” Marsden was flying home to Vancouver from Paris. “I arrived at the airport with a negative PCR test, two positive COVID antibody tests from March and July proving that I still had significant COVID antibodies post-recovery, and a COVID immunity certificate written and signed by my French doctor to confirm this fact.”

The Canadian border officer refused to accept the antibody lab-test results. He ordered her to sign up for a three-day stay at a government facility, followed by a monitored 14-day home quarantine.

She chose to book a return flight to Paris at a cost of just over $1,500 as opposed to the $2,000 she would have had to pay for the three-day government stay.

“Where I really should be is relaxing on the backyard patio or in the Jacuzzi at my home near Vancouver with a cold drink on a hot summer day. Instead, I’m on a Lufthansa flight heading back to Paris,” Marsden wrote.

The issue of natural immunity may not be a discussion that Big Pharma and Big Tech want to entertain, but it needs to take place.

A law professor in Virginia and a Paris-based Canadian journalist question why their COVID-19 antibodies are discounted