– [Paul] No, I think, does natural infection protect you against serious illness associated with re-exposure? Yes. Does natural infection provide a relatively high level of memory B cells? Yes. I mean, if someone says, well, someone could reasonably… Now, that said, there was a study conducted where they took people who were naturally infected, divided them in half. Half got two doses of mRNA vaccine, to show that moving forward, you were 2.5 fold less likely to get infection if you got, as compared to the group that just was naturally infected and not boosted. There’s also studies done showing you really probably only need one dose of mRNA vaccine if you’ve been naturally infected. I wish the CDC actually would make a recommendation on that, because I think the data support that. But I think if somebody says, “Look, I don’t want to get, I don’t want to have to get a vaccine. I don’t want to have to be, say, mandated to get a vaccine, because I’ve been naturally infected,” I think that’s actually a reasonable argument to make. The problem is bureaucratically it’s a nightmare. I mean, in our hospital, we do have a mandatory vaccine policy. And so how would we know that someone was naturally infected? They could hand us their test that says look here, I was PCR positive, or I was antigen positive, which you can buy off the internet. So, I mean, it’s a little hard to do that. The other thing you could do, and it would be approved, would be to get a serology, take the blood and see whether there’s antibodies against the nucleoprotein, the SARS-CoV-2 nucleoprotein, ’cause you can only get that from being naturally infected, and that would be approved.
– [Zubin] And there’s not really an easy commercial test for memory B and T cells against SARS-CoV-2, yeah?
– [Paul] No, it’s all research-provided.