The Santa Barbara Unified School District recently became the first one in Santa Barbara County to require all of its staff to get vaccines, although the board says religious and medical exemptions will be considered. The option for testing has been removed. In his letter to the News-Press, Santa Barbara resident Jeff Barton is questioning the need for vaccinations for individuals with natural immunity.
I once read that if you mix science and politics, you get politics. I don’t know if what the CDC is publishing is exactly politics, but it is not science. You be the judge.
Recently President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring all federal employees and contractors to be vaccinated without the option of testing as an alternative. New York City implemented a vaccine passport system restricting access to most public spaces including gyms, salons, restaurants, bars, etc. Santa Barbara Unified School District voted to require vaccination of all teachers and staff without the option of testing or face termination.
Employers are increasingly requiring proof of vaccination to work or apply for work. Santa Barbara is considering changing discrimination laws to exclude discrimination on the basis of vaccination status. It is everywhere.
We are being required to get vaccinated to work or to just go about the activities of daily life: Get vaccinated or be punished. We are assured that this is necessary due to the great surge in cases, and the threat of a cornucopia of variants each of which is deadly but rendered impotent by the vaccine.
But I question if the vaccine is really required for those who have already had and recovered from COVID-19. After all, we know that in general, infection with a virus confers protection from future infections. Perhaps the great surge in cases is also a great surge in people who are now protected from future infection. Should a positive COVID-19 test be the new vaccine passport?
What does the CDC have to say about this? Going to their website I was assured by the following headline “New CDC Study: Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection.”
Pretty clear right? In the first paragraph there is a highlighted sentence, which I repeat here. “These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone ….”
But this is outright deception. If you read the entire article carefully, the study did not even compare the effectiveness of vaccine immunity to natural immunity. The study examined if those with natural immunity received extra protection from getting the vaccine after recovering.
But the headline and highlighted sentence clearly state that vaccination offers greater protection than natural immunity. So how does natural immunity compare to vaccine immunity?
On the CDC website, there is a tutorial on immunity which points out that there is vaccine immunity and natural immunity both important. They seem to have forgotten their own lesson when it comes to COVID-19.
What is the breakdown of new cases? How many were vaccinated, and how many recovered from a previous COVID infection? The data is missing. Why?
With the great push to vaccinate the world, it is reasonable to ask if the vaccine is necessary.
While the CDC chooses not to report on the effectiveness of natural immunity, the Israelis have reported on this. In a study released 8/25/21 “Comparing SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections,” Gazit et al, it was shown that natural immunity is substantially more effective than vaccine induced immunity. This real-world study of tens of thousands of individuals concluded that “Symptomatic disease rate 27 times higher for vaccine immunity compared to natural immunity.”
My takeaway from all of this is that individuals with natural immunity do not need to get the vaccine if they do not want it. The protection they have is far better than that afforded by the vaccine.
The CDC is intentionally not reporting the infection rate of persons with natural immunity. The CDC seeks to mislead the American public to encourage vaccines for those who do not need them and may not want them. This is a bad policy, and it’s bad science.
Or is it good politics? You decide.
Jeff Barton
Santa Barbara
