Fact Check: Getting A Virus, Acquiring Natural Immunity Is NOT ‘Best Thing You Can Do For Your Body’ Instead Of Getting Vaccinated

Not Best Way

Is getting a virus and acquiring natural immunity the “best thing you can do for your body,” rather than getting a vaccine? No, that’s not true: The only way vaccines get Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval is if they provide protection against illness and death associated with natural infection while presenting a proportionally very low risk of adverse events. According to Dr. James Lawler with the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, “It is important to understand that the FDA (and medical science in general) has a very low risk tolerance for vaccines.” Bottom line: The benefits have to greatly outweigh the risks.

The claim appeared in a Facebook post and video on July 26, 2022. In a key section of the video on-screen text and a man speaking says:

With any virus, natural immunity, getting it, is the best thing that you can do for your body. You don’t need to get a vaccine.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jul 27 16:12:43 2022 UTC)

Natural immunity versus vaccination

In a July 27, 2022, email to Lead Stories, Lawler explains why natural immunity isn’t the best choice:

Humans do well with simple rules of thumb, but we live in a world that is inherently complex. Biology and immunology are incredibly complex. Simple rules – such as ‘natural immunity is always better’ really don’t make sense. … HIV is a great example – we have developed a vaccine that does give partial immunity to HIV, but natural infection is lifelong (until you die). There essentially is no natural immunity. Rabies is another example where we have excellent vaccines that provide virtually perfect protection against disease. I guess it is also true that natural infection with [the] rabies virus imparts 100% protection against reinfection. Because you are dead. But that’s not the strategy I would prefer to prevent rabies.

Lawler says not all viruses behave the same way:

The degree to which natural infection provides long-standing immunity depends very much on the virus. Some virus infections give very poor immunity to reinfection (either with the exact same virus or with closely related strains). Coronaviruses (the ones that cause colds as well as COVID) are great examples where infection produces immunity that is only temporary. Norovirus (the cause of winter vomiting disease) is another example. Smallpox, on the other hand, generally gave lifelong immunity (if you survived).

Ultimately, Lawler says, the standards for vaccines are extremely high because of how they’re used by the medical community:

They [vaccines] are essentially one of the only medical interventions we give to completely well people – therefore we have a very low tolerance for adverse events. The fact is that ANY vaccine that is FDA approved is demonstrated to have a much lower risk of significant adverse events than the disease it is designed to prevent.

Chickenpox is a great example. Some people think that since chickenpox in kids is generally a mild infection, it makes more sense to avoid the chickenpox vaccine and intentionally infect kids with wild-type virus at chickenpox parties. The problem is that while chickenpox is USUALLY mild, it is not always so. Prior to widespread vaccination, kids would get hospitalized with complications of chickenpox – such as serious secondary bacterial infections and inflammation of the brain. This happened in roughly 1 in 1000 kids. On an individual basis, that may sound like low odds. But in a decent sized city, that ends up being many kids every year – since essentially every kid in the US used to get chickenpox. About 1 in 100,000 kids died from chickenpox. In a country of 330 million, that would be many deaths every year if we weren’t vaccinating. The risk of severe complication of vaccine is much, much lower than with natural varicella infection.