Hospitals should hire nurses with natural immunity, not fire them

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Updated – January 20, 2023

BY MARTIN KULLDORFF, October 1st, 2021

Among many surprising developments during this pandemic, the most astonishing has been the questioning of naturally acquired immunity after a person has had Covid disease. We have had natural immunity at least since the Plague of Athens in 430 BC. understood. Thucydides wrote:

„But it was with those who had recovered from illness that the sick and dying found the greatest compassion. These knew from experience what it was and had no fear for themselves; for the same man was never attacked twice - never at least fatally.“ – Thucydides

We have been living with endemic coronaviruses for at least a hundred years, against which we have long-lasting natural immunity. As expected, we have natural immunity even after Covid-19 disease, as despite a widespread virus there have been extremely few reinfections resulting in severe illness or death.

For most viruses, natural immunity is better than vaccine-induced immunity, and this is also true for Covid. In the best study to date, those vaccinated were about 27 times more likely to have symptomatic disease than those with natural immunity, with an estimated range between 13 and 57. With no Covid deaths in either group, both natural immunity and immunity are protective Vaccine immunity good before death.

For the past decade, I have worked closely with hospital epidemiologists. While the role of doctors is to treat patients and get them well, the hospital epidemiologist's job is to ensure that patients in the hospital do not become ill, e.g. B. a deadly virus from another patient or a caretaker.

To that end, hospitals use a variety of measures, from frequent handwashing to complete infection control when caring for an Ebola patient. Vaccinations are an important part of this control effort. For example, patients receive the pneumococcal vaccine two weeks before spleen surgery to minimize postoperative infections, and most clinical staff are immunized against influenza every year.

Infection control measures are particularly critical for older, frail hospital patients with weakened immune systems. You can become infected and die from a virus that most people would easily survive. A major reason for immunizing nurses and doctors against influenza is to ensure that they do not infect such patients.

How can hospitals best protect their patients from Covid? It is an extremely important question that is also relevant for nursing homes. There are some obvious standard solutions, such as separating Covid patients from other patients, minimizing staff rotation and generously giving sick leave to employees with Covid-like symptoms.

Another goal should be to employ staff with the greatest possible immunity to Covid, as they are less likely to catch it and transmit it to their patients. This means that hospitals and care homes should actively seek to recruit staff who have natural immunity to previous Covid illnesses and deploy these staff to their most vulnerable patients.

Therefore, we are now seeing fierce competition with hospitals and nursing homes desperately trying to recruit people with natural immunity. Well, not really.

Instead, hospitals are laying off nurses and other staff with superior natural immunity while retaining those with weaker vaccine-induced immunity. In this way, they betray their patients and increase their risk of hospital-acquired infections.

By enforcing vaccination mandates, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, questioned the existence of natural immunity after Covid disease. He follows the lead of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who questioned natural immunity in a 2020 memorandum published by The Lancet. With the introduction of vaccination mandates, university hospitals are now questioning the existence of natural immunity after Covid disease.

That is amazing.

I work at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, which has announced that all nurses, doctors and other health care providers will be fired if they don't get a Covid vaccine. Last week I spoke to one of our nurses. She worked hard to care for Covid patients, even when some of her colleagues left out of fear at the start of the pandemic.

Not surprisingly, she became infected but then recovered. Now she has stronger and longer-lasting immunity than the vaccinated hospital administrators who fired her because she wasn't vaccinated.

If university hospitals cannot get the medical evidence right on the basic science of immunity, how can we trust them with any other aspects of our health? 

What's next? Universities wonder whether the Earth is round or flat? That would at least do less damage.