FALSE: This claim that natural immunity against COVID-19 is superior to that induced by vaccines is misleading
Scientific evidence shows that a COVID-19 vaccine provides a standardised level of immunity while the level of natural immunity is unpredictable and varies from person to person.
A tweet claiming that natural immunity against COVID-19 is superior to that offered by vaccinations is FALSE.
According to the tweet, natural immunity protects “blood, nose, and throat”, while vaccinated people only offer protection in the blood. This, the tweet argues, is why bodies of vaccinated people only pick up the virus once it enters the blood. In contrast, the tweet further argues that the virus does not get a chance to reach the bloodstream of a person with natural immunity because it gets killed in the nose and throat.
The tweet does not indicate the source of this information and was met with incredulous reactions.
The Johns Hopkins website describes natural immunity as the body’s antibody protection against an infectious agent once a person is infected with it.
On the other hand, vaccine-induced immunity is what people get by being vaccinated with an approved or authorised COVID-19 vaccine or other vaccine.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the main difference between vaccine-induced immunity and natural immunity is that the former is more predictable due to the standardisation of the antigen dosage. A COVID-19 vaccine provides a standardised level of immunity while natural immunity varies from person to person and is unpredictable.
“We know from many studies now, that if you have had a very mild or asymptomatic infection then many people may have very low levels of antibodies that they form. This is why we still recommend that even if you have had a COVID-19 infection, that you should go ahead and take the vaccination when it’s available to you because the vaccine then acts as a boost to the immune system,” said Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, in a video published on the organisation’s Twitter account on 22 August 2021.
Various studies have examined the claim that natural immunity is superior to that offered by vaccines and concluded that it is not true.
One of them was published on November 5, 2021, by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The study examined adults hospitalized for COVID-like sickness between January and September 2021. The findings showed that the chances of these adults testing positive for COVID-19 were more than five times higher in unvaccinated people who had previously been infected with COVID-19 than they were for those who had been vaccinated for COVID and had not had an infection before.
The study adds that the implications of this finding for public health practice is that “all eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.”
A detailed science brief issued by the United States Centers for Disease stated that while both vaccine induced and naturally acquired immunity last for at least six months, vaccines provide a “higher, more robust, and more consistent level of immunity to protect people from COVID-19 than infection alone”. The brief was based on analysis of dozens of studies from around the world as well as the CDC’s own data.
Another study published in August 2021 by the US National Library of Medicine concludes that people who have had COVID-19 before and are not vaccinated are more than two times likely to get reinfected than those who got vaccinated after having COVID-19.
Further, a Johns Hopkins Medicine Study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on 1 November 2021 shows that a combination of natural immunity and vaccines provides a better immunity than immunisation alone.
The British Society for Immunology and the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium have developed an infographic to explain the difference in immunity against COVID-19 through natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 compared to vaccination.
While the WHO emphasises vaccination against COVID-19 within weeks of getting infected by the virus, some countries require people to wait for up to six months before doing so, owing to vaccine shortages, adds Swaminathan.
PesaCheck has examined the claim that natural immunity against COVID-19 is superior to that offered by vaccinations against the disease, and found it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Simon Muli and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Rose Lukalo.
The article was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.