Still Waiting for Fauci’s Answer on Natural Immunity

FAUCI: Not yet, Chuck, we don’t. We’re following that, but not yet. We do know that when you do get infected, you get strong immunity. (sputters) There’s no doubt about that. The durability is unclear. There’s another fact we know that if you do get infected and recover and get vaccinated, the level of your immunity is extraordinarily high, surpassing any of the other two-dose vaccines that you get.

BUCK: The Clay and Buck show here. Clay, there we had “The Fauch” doing the usual dance on TV. He’s saying, “We don’t know…” That was about natural immunity, something you and I have been pushing here, and every doc that I know who listens to this show that’s reached out on this issue has said essentially with one voice, “Thank you for bringing up this thing that the administration was pretending didn’t matter until about five minutes ago, because it’s reckless and it’s wrong and it’s not about science.

“It’s about Politics and Policy making for the Democrat Party.” But Fauci is saying we don’t know how long natural immunity lasts. So that’s kind of thing — and then, “We know that the vaccine on top of natural immunity makes things so much better.” Okay, first of all, they don’t know how long the vaccine lasts. That is for sure. And also, okay, how much better?

Is it reasonable to make people that have natural immunity get the shot so they could have, what, maybe an additional 5% or 10%? I mean, how much additional protection do they have? They don’t know, Clay — and if they did know we would know because there would be numbers and real data attached to some of this, and there’s not.

CLAY: Yeah, and I think focusing on not knowing how much natural immunity lasts, on Friday we played a clip from last year of Fauci saying that if it’s like any other virus, the natural immunity would last a really long time. But also we know, as we pointed out Friday, that the vaccine doesn’t last very long. So trying to undercut the idea of natural immunity by saying, “We know it doesn’t last very long,” or “We don’t know how long it lasts,” is defeating the entire purpose, right?

I mean, it’s hard to come up with any other idea than they think it undercuts the idea of vaccination. ‘Cause, remember, we’re at 76% of adults have had at least one shot now. And they keep saying the unvaccinated are the other 24%. I think there’s probably a pretty substantial portion of that 24% that’s already had covid.

So what percentage of people — and this is the data we should have that we don’t have that they have in England, for instance. What percentage of people now in America, Buck, have form sort of covid antibody immunity here, either from the vaccine or natural? It’s gotta be over 90%.

BUCK: What’s gonna happen… Just remember this is another Buck prediction for the future. What’s going to happen is eventually caseload will be very low, there won’t be the same level of outbreaks. This assuming there’s not antibody-dependent enhancement and new variants and all kinds of crazy things. But I try to be as optimistic as I can under the crazy circumstances we have here.

But at some point, we will have so much natural and durable immunity in the population overall from people just getting infected over the course of about two years of this thing — and viruses historically often have about a two-year life cycle of spread, the same strain of virus throughout a community — then they’ll say, “See? All of our mitigation, all of our shots, all of our masking, it finally worked.”

And at that point, some people say, “Hold on a second. It finally worked? If 250 million people out of 330 got infected with covid, is that really intervention and mitigation working, ’cause that seems like an interesting way to look at it.” So that’s what I think is gonna happen — and also, Clay, nothing is perfect.

I mean, if you do a little bit of deep diving on this you find out really quickly, not only can chicken pox come back — and it often does his does when people are older with weakened immune systems — as shingles, you can actually get the chicken pox again. It can happen. It’s very, very rare. But does anyone surround who’s had chicken pox worry about being the one in a million that gets a second case of chicken pox?

CLAY: Not only that, Buck, as was pointed out to us, the CDC actually specifically recommends that you don’t need to get a chicken pox vaccine if you had chicken pox before.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: Meaning there’s a huge percentage of our listenership out there who are either older than us or… I don’t know. When did the chicken pox vaccine start to really get widely distributed? If you’re probably 25 years old, you might have a gotten the chicken pox vaccine. But I bet if you’re 30 or 35, you probably didn’t. I know we didn’t have it when I was young.

I’m 42, and you didn’t have it when you were a kid; so the vast majority, I would imagine, of our listenership had chicken pox at some point in their life, never got the vaccine. So why does the CDC recommend if you had covid you need to get a vaccine, but the exact opposite for chicken pox? Doesn’t make any sense.