It’s time to consider natural immunity to Covid-19 as equal to one-shot of the vaccine | Eric Topol

The term fully vaccinated' needs to be redefined. It's time for the United States and the CDC to see natural immunity as a partial path to protection

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has failed to recognize that people with confirmed Covid infections, also known as natural immunity," have achieved some level of protection against subsequent infections and severe disease. This has unnecessarily fueled divisiveness, particularly when vaccines are mandated without acknowledgement that prior Covid is an alternate path, albeit with some limitations, for protection of the individual and helping to build the population's immunity wall.

While there has been a body of data supporting a robust immune response to Covid infections, that evidence has recently been substantially bolstered. In the very large trial on the Johnson and Johnson vaccine single shot compared with placebo, among over 2,000 participants with prior infections, as documented by positive antibody status, their protection against moderate or severe disease was 90%. That's much higher than the vaccine efficacy of 56%, yet the CDC recognizes 2-shot of this vaccine as fully vaccinated" but ignores these data, and many other proof points, of natural immunity protection.

Eric Topol is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice-president of Scripps Research