But the less crazy argument—that natural immunity, once you have it, offers protection that’s superior to or as reliable as vaccine-induced immunity—is also deceptive. Studies do show that when people survive COVID, many of them develop robust immunity against reinfection or serious disease. Sometimes that immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity, depending on the person and the degree of vaccination. But immunity derived from COVID infection is unpredictable, for a sensible and worrisome reason: It’s proportional, on average, to the severity of your infection, and you don’t know how sick you’ll get. The more easily you escape serious illness, the weaker your resulting immunity is likely to be. And the immunity you get from the virus, like vaccine-induced immunity, wanes over time.
It’s simpler and wiser to build up your immunity against COVID with predictable, regulated doses that don’t include the whole virus, have been tested for safety and efficacy, and can be repeated as necessary. In other words, vaccination. The precise repeatability of vaccines gives them a long-term advantage: Even when natural immunity starts out as more effective, vaccination eventually overtakes it. Last week, a study in Scotland confirmed that this principle applies to COVID. It found that “immunity from natural infection (without vaccination) is more protective than two doses of vaccine but inferior to three doses.”
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