“There was a Kentucky study that shows that if you’re naturally infected and then immunized, as opposed to naturally infected but not immunized, the person who was immunized has a 2.5-fold lesser risk of being infected,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and virologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Dispatch. “So there’s an advantage to vaccination.”

But it’s one thing to say that a given person is not as protected from COVID infection as possible, and another thing entirely to insist that person presents a “grave danger” to the people around him, significant enough for the federal government to mandate he make changes to his behavior.

“If we’re going to OSHA mandates,” Offit said, “it’s not an unreasonable thing for someone to say, ‘I have been naturally infected, I think I’m likely to be protected against severe disease, and I would prefer not to get a vaccine.’ I think that’s something someone could reasonably say. It just means you have to prove it, you know, with an antibody test, which is expensive and time-consuming.”