The idea that “natural immunity” is somehow superior to immunity acquired through vaccines has real-world consequences, too, particularly when it is applied to the pandemic. First and foremost, this idea is used by advocates as an intentional argument to oppose vaccine mandates of any kind, as we’ve seen many times. The line of argument goes like this: People with previous COVID-19 infection should not be required to get the vaccine as a condition of their jobs, to enter public spaces, or for any other reason. Again, this ignores the science showing that post-infection immunity is far more variable and might not be as long lasting as vaccine-induced immunity, as well as the logistical problems of documenting who has and hasn’t had COVID-19 for the purposes of such mandates.

When it comes to the claimed superiority of “natural herd immunity” things get even more dangerous and potentially deadly. After all, “natural herd immunity” was the rationale behind the Great Barrington Declaration, a declaration promoted a year ago by the free market libertarian think tank the American Institute for Economic Research that advocated, in essence, letting COVID-19 rip through the “healthy” population in order to achieve “natural herd immunity,” while using “focused protection” to keep those most vulnerable to severe disease and death from COVID-19 safe. As I discussed when it was first published, the Great Barrington Declaration did not describe how the vulnerable could be protected when the coronavirus was spreading unchecked through the rest of the population (it couldn’t) and actually represented eugenics more than anything else, as well as a technique of a “magnified minority” that sought to make a very minority fringe opinion seem mainstream. It’s a technique that had been used by climate science deniers, HIV/AIDS denialists, and creationists before, but unfortunately, unlike the case for those science denialists, the Great Barrington Declaration was a raging success. For example, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then-President Donald Trump eagerly embraced the principles and ideas of the declaration. More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a signatory and apostle of the GBD Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Surgeon General and Secretary of the Florida Department of Health.

The religious idea of “purity” versus “contamination” (with sin or evil or whatever) that requires “purification” is a very old one. It’s at the root of damned near all alternative medicine and is never lurking far from antivaccine views. This concept goes hand-in-hand with the idea that “natural” means “virtuous” and is always better than the “unnatural”, such as those nasty pharmaceuticals and vaccines. (Never mind that immunity from vaccination is natural.) It’s also a profoundly harmful idea. It was harmful before the pandemic when cancer patients sought out “natural cures”—but cancer is natural!—and antivaxxers touted “natural immunity,” and, as Levinovitz points out, it’s even more harmful now…