A physician for Novak Djokovic attested that because the Serbian tennis star had caught and recovered from COVID-19, he was eligible to apply for a medical exemption to not get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Catching and recovering from the virus offers some natural protection against further infection — but natural immunity differs from person to person and wanes over time. As tens of thousands of Australians become infected daily, the question remains: should there be different rules for the recovered?
What level of natural immunity is there?
When it first emerged, there was considerable speculation about whether COVID could be caught twice. Reinfections were initially rare — by August 2020 just a handful of people who had caught the virus became reinfected.
An initial study from November 2020 found that just 0.7% of those in the United States who had recovered caught the virus again.
But hopes were short-lived. As natural immunity waned and the virus evolved and mutated and variants emerged, scores of people caught the same or new strains, causing surge after surge of case numbers. One study found that reinfection occurred for most people 16 months after recovery.
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute infectious disease professor Marc Pellegrini says natural immunity is a result of antibodies produced by the immune system to fight the virus. But how many antibodies are produced and how long they stay in a person’s system varies from person to person.
“It’s very hard to know whether someone who’s been infected — particularly those that become quite unwell — have actually got a robust immune response,” he said.
“Speculatively, people that get very sick have defined themselves as probably not having a particularly robust immune response against the virus, whereas people who are asymptomatic or recover quickly are more likely to have had a robust immune response.”
Relying on natural immunity is risky
There’s a reason variants have emerged in areas with low vaccination rates: the virus is more likely to mutate in a person with a poor immune response to it. There’s speculation the Omicron variant mutated during a chronic infection in an immunocompromised person, such as an untreated HIV/AIDS patient.
Vaccines use the body’s natural immune response to produce antibodies, but produce a much higher antibody response than the immune system would naturally produce. This gives the virus less opportunity to mutate and change.
“The virus evolves very fast in people that have had a poor immune response because it can escape [the immune system] more readily, giving it an opportunity to change its colours a little bit,” Pellegrini said.
Natural immunity is no match for vaccines
It’s difficult to draw conclusions on natural immunity as antibody production differs from person to person. It’s much easier to draw conclusions on vaccines because while the immune response is still different for everyone, the baseline level of antibody production is much higher.
Pfizer and Moderna are developing a vaccine specific to Omicron; Pfizer announced this morning its vaccine would be ready by March.
Although the Omicron-specific vaccine isn’t as important here — with boosters rolled out to more than 3.2 million Australians — Pellegrini says it will be key in countries with low vaccination rates. And although a booster dose of an mRNA vaccine will offer high levels of protection from severe disease from Omicron and other strains, rolling out a variant-specific vaccine will offer greater protection for those receiving their first or second vaccine dose.
“Giving the best vaccine for the variants that are most common at the time, rather than having to give the more suboptimal vaccine they’re having to give more often, is the best course of action,” Pellegrini said.
I am confused by this article.
The reason proffered for why natural immunity is ‘risky’ is because the immunity wanes after time.
But that is also the exact problem the vaccines face.
So I googled “natural immunity vs vaccine covid pubmed” and the first hit is the article below. This peer reviewed study on the NIH website contradicts the main thrust of this Crikey article…
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34868754/
All of the included studies found at least statistical equivalence between the protection of full vaccination and natural immunity; and, three studies found superiority of natural immunity. Four observational studies found a statistically significant incremental benefit to vaccination in the COVID-recovered individuals.
While vaccinations are highly effective at protecting against infection and severe COVID-19 disease, our review demonstrates that natural immunity in COVID-recovered individuals is, at least, equivalent to the protection afforded by complete vaccination of COVID-naïve populations. There is a modest and incremental relative benefit to vaccination in COVID-recovered individuals; however, the net benefit is marginal on an absolute basis. Therefore, vaccination of COVID-recovered individuals should be subject to clinical equipoise and individual preference. Ha so Novak should get to choose! 🙂
I assume Amber does not have any science qualifications, if so she may wish to hand them back after this effort…
I find most people’s minds are made up dilettantebeth, irrespective of which side they’re on. Covid has polarised the masses.
Most are unwilling to look at anything with an open mind. And a lot of that is due, IMO, to govt and then media messaging, which proclaimed a singular measure – vaccination – as the way out of the covid situation. No other long-term measures were deemed necessary, so now that it hasn’t worked (regarding stopping the spread) we’re left with a health system, a full 2 years on, that still isn’t equipped to deal with a pandemic!
How many wards could have been built in 2 years?? How many beds could have been procured? How many EN’s and AEN’s could have been upskilled to handle RN duties specific to covid? And what about initiatives to improve people’s immune systems through measures other than vaccination? Like eating fresh vegetables, exercising and sleeping more. Where have those initiatives been?
Vaccination should have been but one measure in a suite of initiatives.
Apart from lack of competency in doing anything – let alone more than one at a time – the answer is probably that no maaates had a scam that could be shoehorned into doing the obvious things like build wards and upskill staff.
Just not enough profit to be bothered.
As for eating fresh fruit & vegs. lotsa luck with that at anytime but I have just returned from visiting both of the Duopolies and there were a lot of empty spaces in that area, often just a token pack of prepacked carrots or pale, frozen tomatoes, again prepacked.
What I don’t get is this.
If the the Federal Government is stopping all people who haven’t been tested and who haven’t been vaccinated how did Omicron get in?
Did it swim here?
Did it get blown by the wind?
No. It came on a plane in a person’s nose and throat.
The fact that omicron turned up in Aus about a day after it was announced as the new go-to virus, one breed thousands of kilometers away from Africa, shows it had no trouble getting past Morrison’s border police.
The same question applies to Delta.
The Australian border, the one that Morrison defended so cycnically against boat people is as leaky as hell when it comes to covid. The whole border protection thing is humbug. Just like the man in charge.
Seriously can someone explain this? What’s the physics at play here?
Not physics, psychology & sociopathy.
There is a gap between when someone is exposed and when they can be detected as infectious. If they fly out of another country and into Australia during this gap they evade whatever border controls apply at either end. This is the point of quarantine.
In the case of Delta, it was brought in by Fedex flight crew who don’t have to quarantine for 14 days, just stay in particular hotels and they are not supposed to move around in the community. The vulnerability was that the flight crew are transported from the airport to those hotels in cars with local drivers and the driver in this particular case was unvaccinated and not masked either. He caught the bug and transmitted it to the Sydney population.
Plenty of other people arrived in Australia and went into quarantine healthy but caught Covid while in there. If they caught it in the last 48 hours before being released to the community they might have tested negative but still have gone on to infect others once out in the community. This is why purpose built quarantine facilities with good ventilation/access to the outdoors are desireable and were advocated by many.
Florida is often cited by libertarians as a good example to follow. Despite the partying images that have made such an impression on you, Florida is actually a health train wreck.
Since Feb 2020 data from John Hopkins shows cumulative covid related deaths there totaled 291 deaths per 100K up to Jan 7. This is close to NY state total of 297 deaths per 100K, however the higher uptrend in Florida (due to the libertarian agenda) will see it surpass NY state later this month.
About half of NY state’s total of 297 was recorded in the first wave in 2020, thereafter for the past 15 months the measures relating to social distancing, masking have seen NY’s cumulative rate rise at about half the rate of Florida’s.
As for California, 195 deaths per 100k, well below Florida’s 291 deaths. Sweden, 149 deaths per 100K, almost five times the rate seen in neighbor Finland, which embraced pandemic control measures.
As for Australia – all that pain and inconvenience – has yielded a dividend – just 9 deaths per 100K.
So let’s get this clear – the libertarian paradise Florida has a death rate 32 times that which we see in Australia. But there is more disruption in Australia than Florida? Well total employment in Florida has only just now hit levels seen in February 2020, whereas for Australia, total employment is now 2% higher than in Feb 2020.
Across the US nation, the deaths seen in 9/11 is repeated every 2 days. So I think the outrage of libertarians is somewhat misdirected.
There you go with those damned facts & numbers.
Pity that most cannot grasp the concept.
Thank you Mycroft Pellegrini for this gem-like aperçu – “…people that get very sick have defined themselves as probably not having a particularly robust immune response against the virus, whereas people who are asymptomatic or recover quickly are more likely to have had a robust immune response.”
With that revelation & $5 I could buy a cup of coffee…if the cafe wasn’t shut down.
Fed Minister for Home Affairs should put a ‘rider’ on Novak Djokovic’s stay, that if he becomes ill with covid whilst in Australia, no public resources or medicine stockpile is available to him — or is only available after all other covid-positive patients have been given care/doses, and stockpile remains available to any Australian residents (including refugees in detention) for two weeks following Novak’s date of hospitalisation. And that he will be repatriated to Europe at his & his retinue’s expense.