The Calculus of Safety In the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Dangers of Natural Immunity Vs. Vaccine Harm.

Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Anthony Fauci occupy the two sides of a calculus that must be well balanced. RFK Jr. is focused on safety. Anthony Fauci is squarely focused on efficacy. The trouble is that the efficacy side is making a radically incorrect mistake by ostracizing and marginalizing the safety side. The demonization and marginalization of RFK Jr. by the “mainstream” political and medical establishment is nothing short of a dramatic and dangerous political error. Because safety and efficacy must be on equal footing in a democratic republic where the people demand both..

Forgetting for the moment the comical conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a hoax for a moment, there actually is a serious argument being made by a few hard core critics of our sheepish mainstream approach to the pandemic.

There is this idea circulating around the vaccine safety community that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is superior to vaccine immunity — and that for this reason we ought to abandon COVID-19 vaccinations.

I agree with the first part of this argument. Natural immunity IS highly likely to be far more robust (and durable?) than vaccine immunity, which is by definition static and limited to the restricted antigenic moieties engineered into the vaccine product.

So the folks who are naturally immune because they were infected are lucky. The majority of them are immune and do not need to be vaccinated, or if they do a single booster shot might suffice — both because vaccinating such immune persons is unnecessary, and because it is potentially dangerous to at least some of them.

Simply, the mortality cost of achieving a robust population level natural immunity is going to be massively higher than the mortality cost of vaccinating the population safely and efficiently. This is an unassailable epidemiological fact.

So, though I agree 100% that natural immunity is highly likely to be more robust than vaccine immunity, I also know that “perfect is the enemy of good” — and that achieving natural herd immunity will kill a lot more people than vaccine related complications would worldwide.

The best we can and must do, is to mitigate as well as possible against vaccine harm, to vaccinate rationally in order to protect those minorities vulnerable to known and potential vaccine harm — but to nonetheless, vaccinate as quickly as possible.

We are in a pandemic that is real — to deny this is either a delusion or pure jingoism. This virus that originated in China has set us on fire….a very large (but minority) number of people are in harm’s way from natural infection, as are an even smaller minority subset of people in harms way from our vaccine products — both these minority subsets (one larger than the other) need to be maximally and rationally protected to the best of our abilities. Vaccines are a necessary defensive weapon to protect those minority persons at risk of harm, but vaccines themselves also can harm a minority subset. The trouble is that in this large scale pandemic, either of these two minority subsets can include any one of us, or the persons we love and care for. So we must protect both — to the best of our abilities.

How?

By vaccinating as safely and quickly as possible — in this imperfectly manageable situation.