“...he doesn’t have an idea if natural immunity exists or not?”
We’re back to what “it” is.
Natural immunity cannot exist as long as there is no way to destroy the virus. This is why people are getting sick more than one time. The virus isn’t dead and it can attack the body again and again until the body can clobber all of it in each attack. The vaccines are not designed to do that and it takes a long time for one body to create its own immunity.
To give you an idea, there are still outbreaks of the bubonic plague in the US every year. This virus today is the one that hit San Francisco in 1900 and has stayed the same and morphed to something different in other strains. It ain’t dead, Jim. It, in a lot of cases, just changed it clothes.
It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon. Maybe never. Me, possibly never.
A good article:
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/herd-immunity
wy69
Bubonic plague is a bacteria, not a virus.
Natural immunity is achieved by having and surviving an infection as opposed to vaccine derived immunity. What is clear with the Covid vaccines is that they do not induce a long lived immunity. It is also clear that at this point in time natural infection derived immunity has lasted twice as long as the vaccine derived immunity.
The number of people with natural immunity that have gotten reinfected is vanishingly small compared to the number of vaccinated breakthrough cases.
People who are at risk due to age or poor health should probably get vaccinated to increase their chances of surviving when (not if) they get infected and then they will have natural immunity for however long it lasts.
Covid is going to be with us forever, because it has animal hosts and so can potentially cycle back to humans at any time, exactly like influenza.
Almost all of the successfully vaccine controlled diseases are exclusive to humans and do not have animal reservoirs and we have vaccines that work for decades or a lifetime.