The Science Explained

Natural Immunity vs. Vaccine-Induced Immunity

Natural immunity vs. vaccine-induced immunity is one of the most important subjects in the entire “Covid conversation.” In this video Dr. Christina Parks, PhD., analyzes the specific differences in your biology for vaccine-induced immunity vs. natural immunity. Watch this and you’ll quickly be able to understand your risks and benefits for either viewpoint. 

04/02/2022

If you've had Covid do you still need to get the Covid vaccine or is your natural immunity enough? Well, natural immunity is superior for a variety of reasons so you do not need the vaccine. One infection provides a robust immune response that activates many, many different branches of the immune system. Vaccine induced immunity only primarily activates one. 

So you have many different aspects of your immunity that are activated by natural infection, and that is always superior to vaccine induced immunity. Next natural infection, once you recovered, you have sterilizing immunity. What does that mean? You have antibodies in your nose and throat, in your mucosa, that actually prevent that neutralize the virus and prevent you from spreading it when you are exposed to it again.

And so you are not going to be spreading any virus after you've recovered to other people around you. That's very different from vaccine-induced immunity, which we know that you can in fact, you can get large amounts of virus in your nose and throat and still spread it to other people.

Another reason is that natural immunity protects against future variants. So everyone's worried about Delta, Omicron and who knows what's next. But if you've had a natural infection, you are going to generate a robust immunity that is basically going to protect against all future variants and so you don't have to worry about that.

If you have a vaccine induced immunity, it's only going to protect against the variant for the vaccine that you got it for, so you might want to make sure you ask the doctor what variant does is protect against, because if it's not the variant that's circulating, that could be problematic. All right?

Now there's some in the media talking about how natural immunity wanes, because your antibodies wane, you don't need to worry about your antibodies waning because you have special cells called memory T cells and memory B cells that even if they're not in large amounts, they are just waiting to basically proliferate and attack that virus, should you see it again. 

So usually natural immunity lasts years and years. And so you don't need to worry about it waning. However, now we're finding that vaccine induced immunity is waning between three and six months. And again, it doesn't produce sterilizing immunity. It's only protecting you from severe disease.