The damage that public health authorities have done to their credibility by refusing to demonstrate due acknowledgment of naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19 has been immense.  Perhaps they’re ideologically motivated, but it might be as simple as believing that the risks of vaccination are low enough and its effectiveness high enough that the clarity and ease of a message of vaccinating everybody is decisive.

If that’s the thinking, though, then they have to tell people that’s the thinking.  Otherwise, as we’re seeing, the ease of the message gets swamped by skepticism.

It doesn’t take much to see the value of nuance in these decisions.  Consider the following, from an Epoch Times article by Ivan Pentchoukov, regarding research in Finland showing natural immunity lasting for at least a year:

The scientists then investigated antibody levels one year after infection by randomly selecting 367 subjects from the original cohort who hadn’t yet been vaccinated. Eighty-nine percent of the subjects still carried neutralizing antibodies, and 36 percent still carried the IgG antibody.

Antibody levels were higher in subjects who had experienced severe COVID-19 disease. Compared to those who had mild disease, these subjects had two to seven times as many antibodies for at least 13 months after infection.

“Studies of individuals who have recovered from [CCP virus] infection are crucial in determining for how long antibodies persist after infection and whether these antibodies protect against re-infection,” the scientists wrote.

Pay particular attention to the middle paragraph, because it’s crucial not only for individual decisions, but for our very understanding of the pandemic.

Attempting to leave natural immunity entirely out of the conversation raises inevitable skepticism about the government’s advice.  Among those who are skeptical, there will be some who had moderate-to-severe COVID and know they are immune, but there will also be some who merely tested positive and are likely not immune.  Because the latter know the government is lying to them, they may not consider that they are slipping through the immunity cracks.

The issue affects our understanding of the pandemic, as well, because it affects our ability even to have an accurate picture.  As noted in this space a few weeks ago, the reason some studies find that natural immunity is iffy is that many people were told they had been infected when a more-considered judgment would have told them that they had not.

In that light, the reason natural immunity is less than might be expected is that the pandemic was not as pervasive as we pretended.  And if the pandemic was not as pervasive, then many of those “cases” listed as “hospitalizations” and “deaths” should not have been counted in the COVID toll, either.

The overall impression, which reinforces skepticism, is that the public health authorities (aided and abetted by the media) overreacted and threw the world into devastating turmoil.  Now, they’re hoping they can just get everybody vaccinated and move on as if there’s nothing to see, here.

Put differently, they can’t be honest, because they’ll be exposed.  (And whether fair or not, that exposure will lend credence to suspicions that some of them did it knowingly, for political reasons.)  That reality, in turn, casts a shadow over everything they might suggest, from masks to quarantines, because it could very well be just a continuation of the coverup.

Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.