Workers at Michigan-based Spectrum Health can avoid the company’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate if they can prove they have natural immunity to the virus.
“While we still recommend vaccination for people with prior COVID-19 infection, according to this new research, there is increasing evidence that natural infection affords protection from COVID-19 reinfection and severe symptoms for a period of time,” Spectrum said in a statement, according to local media. “Current studies are not clear on how long natural immunity protects from reinfection.”
Under the hospital policy, workers will have to submit to an antibody test to prove they’re immune.
Natural immunity, meaning that a person has contracted COVID-19 and recovered, is rarely discussed in national conversations about vaccines, although some studies have shown that individuals who were previously infected have displayed significant resistance to the virus.
Researchers in Israel found that previous infection has provided better protection to individuals against the Delta variant than the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.
“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease, and hospitalization due to the Delta variant,” researchers from Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University said.
A landmark study from Emory University and published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine in July revealed that individuals who have natural immunity display long and robust protection against COVID-19.
“We saw that antibody responses, especially IgG antibodies, were not only durable in the vast majority of patients but decayed at a slower rate than previously estimated, which suggests that patients are generating longer-lived plasma cells that can neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein,” Rafi Ahmed, director at Emory Vaccine Center and lead author, told Emory News Center on July 22.
This is an excerpt from The Epoch Times.
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