Mini-Throughput: Why “Natural Immunity” Isn’t All That Hot

A screen capture of Fox News touting vaccine success.

I’ve been toying with a post on this for a while but Kurzgesagt recently did a video that perfectly encapsulates an important part of our ongoing debate about vaccines:

Our immune system is extraordinarily powerful. However, it has a tendency to be indiscriminate in how it deploys that power, at least at first. Its initial response to a virus or bacteria it has not seen before can be all-hands-in-deck all-hands-to-the-pumps situation. And that can be bad because that extreme response can damage the body it is trying to protect. During the 1918 flu pandemic, for example, many people died not from the virus from the “cytokine storm” of their body over-reacting to a novel virus. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, this was thought to be causing a lot of the COVID deaths. However, even absent a cytokine storm, your body going full metal immune response is almost never a good thing. It can scar vital organs, it can damage muscles and it can literally shorten your lifespan. Every sickness — yes, even “harmless” childhood disease — does some degree of lasting damage. Usually too small to be noticed but sometimes, as in the case of a novel disease, significant.

By contrast, vaccines do not induce this kind of response. They familiarize your body with a small amount of a dead virus, a weak virus or, in the case of COVID-19, the most recognizable part of the virus. The result is that immunity is gained without doing the damage of a drastic immune response. And if your body encounters the virus in the future, it is more likely to moderate its response than to go ape on it.

Now I’m going to riff on Kurzgesagt’s video into something more speculative. One of the notable things about our society is that we are not only living longer, we are living better. If you’re a middle-aged person, you are very likely in better health and just look younger than your grandparents did at your age. This despite a raging obesity problem. We are aging better than ever and having fewer health problems at later ages than previous generations did. Why is that?

I believe there many factors that are causing us to age more gracefully than our ancestors did. But a huge factor is probably vaccines. By not getting childhood diseases, by not getting the flu every year, by not being exposed to cholera and typhus and all manner of things, our bodies are enduring far less of the low-grade damage that builds up over the decades and ages us.¹

One of the talking points of the COVID “skeptics” has long been that the virus kills “only” 1% of people and even smaller percentages of young people. But COVID is not a binary. It’s not like it kills you or you’re fine. Being sick damages your body. Going to the hospital damages your body. Being pumped with life-saving interventions damages your body. There is a growing wealth of evidence that many of those who survive COVID-19, especially if they were not vaccinated, have ongoing health problems up to and including “long COVID”. And it is likely that “complications from COVID” will be something that appears on death certificates into the indefinite future. We are unfortunately doing a natural experiment here. Over the next few decades, we are going to see how the long-term health of the vaccinated compares to that of the unvaccinated. And I would bet my house² that the vaccinated not only do better, but significantly so.

It is especially distressing to see skepticism about COVID vaccines back-flowing into skepticism about all vaccines. Because vaccines are one of the most incredible developments in human history. They are the reason most of us live past out fifth birthdays. They are the reason children aren’t routinely blinded, deafened or disabled by “harmless” childhood disease. But I also believe they are a critical part of why we are aging better than ever; why our medical advances have not created a society of demented cryptkeepers hobbling around. Even if you doubt the COVID vaccines — and you shouldn’t — why turn your back on one of mankind’s greatest triumphs? Why put your trust in, to pick an example almost at random, the idiot scion of a failed political dynasty instead of the thousands of scientists, doctors, virologists and epidemiologists who have created, promulgated and documented this medical miracle?

There is a tendency in our society to favor “natural” things over artificial things. But humans naturally do not live as long as we do, do not live as well as we do and spend their short lives in a crushing poverty those in developed countries can not even imagine. So I am very happy that Kurzgesagt did this video to show, in wonderful detail, how our natural immune system is incredible, agile, skilled, miraculous … but also dangerous, destructive and callous. Don’t let the word “natural” romanticize things. Natural immunity sucks.

1. One can take this too far. There are theories that the rise of allergies are a result of our society being a bit too clean. We don’t want our immune system to go nuclear but we also don’t want them to go slack. There’s a balance here. But it’s way on the side of vaccines.
2. If the bank didn’t own half of it.