Vaccinating People Who Have Had COVID-19: Why Doesn’t Natural Immunity Count in the U.S.?

Editor’s note: Here’s an excerpt from an article in The BMJ. To read the piece in its entirety, click here.

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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate. 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).

The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritizing vaccination.

“The CDC could say [to people who had recovered], very well grounded in excellent data, that you should wait 8 months,” Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California San Francisco, told Medpage Today in January. She suggested authorities ask people to “please wait your turn.”

Read the entire The BMJ article here.