Vaccinating People Who Have Had Covid-19: Why Doesn’t Natural Immunity Count in the US?

This originally appeared on The BMJ. The US CDC estimates that SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 100 million Americans, and evidence is mounting that natural immunity is at least as protective as vaccination. Yet public health leadership says everyone needs the vaccine. Jennifer Block investigates When the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate.1 As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults aged 18-59 (table 1). Table 1 Estimated … Continue reading Vaccinating People Who Have Had Covid-19: Why Doesn’t Natural Immunity Count in the US?