Dr. Weston, chief health policy advisor for Milwaukee County, discusses natural immunity individuals experience after having COVID-19 verses COVID-19 immunity provided by the vaccine.
Now another topic to discuss one that garners more controversy than many other issues and that’s the protection provided by covet infection as compared to covid vaccine so there’s been a large amount of research on this and there’s certainly some conflicting findings which can make it confusing now i’m trying to answer the question
About natural immunity versus vaccine immunity that is immunity from infection versus immunity from the vaccine there’s two main ways that we can evaluate the evidence available so the first is to look at the immune response inside the body and the second is to look at how that
Immune response works in the real world so starting with the body’s immune response it’s important to understand one part of the immune system that we often hear about and that’s antibodies now we hear about antibodies as they’re one of the easiest components to test for with a simple blood test
But it’s important to remember that there’s much more to our immune system than just antibodies so think of antibodies as the bullets in your immune armory so bullets are important but so are tanks bombers missiles warships you don’t want to go to war with just bullets you want the whole arsenal
And when we study natural versus vaccine-induced immunity for those components of the immune system we find often that people with natural immunity seem to have inconsistent immune responses so while some people possess that entire arsenal of the immune protection others lack a critical part b cells this is in
The bone marrow they’re cells that maintain memory of the infection long term to fight it down the line now additionally there seems to be an association between the severity of the infection how sick you get and how robust and long lasting your immune response is in the end the results are simply
Inconsistent as to whether natural infection develops the immune response necessary to sufficiently prevent infection but we can also take the next step and look at how natural infection and vaccine-induced immunity play out in the real world and here too we see conflicting studies so on the one hand you have a study out
Of kentucky and this looked at residents of kentucky and found that among those who’d previously been infected the vaccine cut down their risk of reinfection more than two-fold now in contrast there was a recent pre-print study out of israel that seemed to show that natural immunity may actually be more protective than
Vaccine-induced immunity now importantly that study is pre-print it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet and it does contain some potential areas of bias such as those who seek out vaccine may also be more likely to seek out testing and be found to be positive and nonetheless it’s an interesting addition to the body of research
And a final twist to add to all this is the future ability for natural immunity versus vaccine immunity to fight against variants of the virus several studies have demonstrated that the targeted immunity provided by the vaccine actually works better against circulating variants than the more general immunity provided
By infection with previous strains of coven so how do we wrap our heads around all this well first the scientific process is not always neat and tidy and there’s that’s certainly the case here but we can draw some clear conclusions sure there is some conflicting research but in general
It seems that there may be inconsistency in how robust immunity is obtained through natural infection what many studies have demonstrated definitively is that the combination of natural infection and vaccine immunity if you’ve gotten infected in the past also getting vaccinated that’s the strongest protection of all
Now given that we have a vaccine that’s exceeded exceedingly studied and incredibly safe it makes sense to recommend that everyone get vaccinated regardless of past infection and even if you’ve had a confirmed infection in the past the vaccine will give you an added boost of protection and more consistency
And reliability in your immunity now as well as to future variants and of course there’s no better time to get vaccinated than now with the state program extended to get a hundred dollars for getting vaccinated so make the choice protect yourself your family and your community and get your vaccine today you
