epochtimes | Dr. Kulldorff: First of all, we expected that we would have good natural immunity from a virus like this. So it’s not a surprise that we do have it. There have been studies showing that we have good immunity from having COVID before. People can be reinfected and test positive, but there’s very few cases where somebody had it and then they get the serious disease afterwards. There are millions of people who have had COVID.
So if this was a common thing, it would have shown up all over the place, but it hasn’t. So it’s very rare. Once you’ve had it, you have good protection from your immune system for a serious disease or for mortality. There has been some direct comparison.
There was some data from Israel that came out recently showing that if you have had a vaccine, you’re 6.7 times more likely to be reinfected than if you have had the COVID disease itself. So we would expect that you get better immunity from the disease than you do from the vaccine. And of course, there’s only that one study.
We don’t know exactly, but we can confidently say that having had the disease at least gives you as good and probably better immunity than the vaccine. Empirically, we know that if you have a disease, you have at least one-and-a-half years of good immunity, because the virus has been with us for that amount of time. So we know that there’s long lasting immunity from having had COVID disease.
From the vaccine, we have less information because it only came in December. So it’s a bit over half-a-year. So we know that there’s good immunity for six months. Hopefully it’s longer, but we don’t have the same amount of data, the same evidence as we do for a natural immunity from actually having the disease naturally.
But for public health scientists, it’s very surprising that this is not recognized. We are forcing people who had the disease, who have good immunity to take a vaccine, even though they have an immunity that’s better than, or at least as good as those who have only had the vaccine.
At the same time, there are a lot of people who need these vaccines who are not getting them. People in India, Nigeria and Brazil, where a lot of older and especially poor people do not get the vaccine because they don’t have enough doses.
So those are the ones we should emphasize being vaccinated. Then we should view this as a global effort to vaccinate the old everywhere in the world, instead of vaccinating people that already have very good immunity against the disease.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that people are being forced to take a vaccine. I don’t know of anyone in the U.S. actually being forced to take it directly. Tell me what you mean when you say that.
Dr. Kulldorff: There’s a push both for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. If people want to have a job and stay at the job, they are required to take the vaccine or they’ll be fired. If they want to study at the university, many universities are requiring vaccines for all the students.
So there are these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. In New York City, for example, now they’re requiring restaurants to require vaccinations for people who go to the restaurants.
That is a very coercive way to get people to vaccinate. And that’s very bad for public health. One question is, “Why do you coerce people who are immune or people who are young, who have very small risk, when the vaccines are much more needed in for older people in other places?” So that’s an ethical aspect of it. I think it is very unethical to do so.
The other aspect is that if you force something on people, if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. Public health has to be based on trust. If public health officials want the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public. I’ve been working on vaccines for almost two decades now. One thing that we’ve always tried to do is to maintain good confidence in the vaccines.
For example, measles vaccines are very important, as well as polio vaccines. There is a small group of people who are very vocal, who don’t like vaccines, but they haven’t really been able to put any dent in the confidence in vaccines. It’s very high in the U.S. So we’ve been very successful in maintaining that confidence.
But right now with these vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports, this coercive thing is turning a lot of people away from vaccines, and not trusting them for very understandable reasons. “Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine, if it’s so beneficial to you?” That’s one rationale.
Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.
Even if they manage to coerce somebody to get the COVID vaccines, because of people saying, “Okay, I have to take it because I need to go to a university or I have to, because I want that job, or I want to go to restaurants,” even if they manage to get those people to take the COVID vaccine, it will turn them off from public health. It will make them distrust public health and turn them off from other vaccines that are not mandatory.
So it has ripple effects in other aspects of public health that are very unfortunate. I’m a native of Sweden. so I know a little bit about Sweden. Sweden has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and the highest confidence in vaccines in the world.
But there’s absolutely no mandate. It just doesn’t do it that way. It’s completely voluntary. If you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary. There shouldn’t be any mandates.
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