Natural Immunity: The Elephant in the Room
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
—Socrates
On New Year’s Day, I woke to some extraordinary news in my inbox. In fact, it is probably the best news I have received in this whole two-year trauma fest of case counts and spike protein videos.
I learned I now have natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2. And rather decent immunity, at that.
This would, of course, be welcome news to anyone after the daily meat-grinder we’ve been trapped in since early 2020. However, for a leukemia patient, it’s a passport to nirvana.
I cried. And for anyone who knows me, you’ll know that’s less common than a Bristle-thighed Curlew on Vancouver Island. (I’m also a birdwatcher.)
I didn’t even know if I could produce measurable antibodies, due to the leukemia treatments I had been on for four continuous years. Nor did my doctors.
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
In 2016, I was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. While CLL is not a disease a person usually dies from if treated at the right time, it is also not considered curable at present. A long drug-free remission is the best one can hope for. But that’s not as gloomy as it sounds, especially with the new and very effective non-chemo drugs available today. Thanks to the miracle of medical research, a person with CLL can now expect to live a full-length life with good quality of life, so long as nothing goes wrong. And I plan to.
CLL is literally a cancer of the immune system—specifically the B-cell lymphocytes. So any drug treating CLL will, by definition, be depleting B-cell lymphocytes. And quite dramatically, if it’s any good. B-cell lymphocytes, as you may recall from our daily immunology lessons on CNN, are the source of our antibodies.
One of the drugs I was on (a BCL2 inhibitor called venetoclax) does a superb job of depleting B-cell lymphocytes. A second drug I had recently been on (an older monoclonal antibody called rituximab) does an even more superb job of depleting B cells while also taking out T-cell lymphocytes as collateral damage, even though they were peaceably minding their own business and in fact doing much good.
The pay-off for this blitzkrieg on my immune system at the worst possible time in contemporary history is that I am now in remission and may stay that way for years. Sometimes life is about making the least bad choice.
I finished all drugs in July 2021. However the rituximab was expected to continue its immune-depleting work until October, at which point my immune reconstitution would begin.
So would an August-September 2021 infection of mild Covid-19 (unconfirmed self-diagnosis until last week) be able to trigger an antibody response in my body? Apparently it would!
To add some further statistical detail that will be irrelevant to all but the immune-compromised, at the time of my Kinexus antibody test, my Absolute Lymphocyte Count was (and still is) below normal at 0.5 (10*9/L). My IgG had finally crept back into the bottom end of normal at 7.3 g/L. But my IgA and IgM were (and will likely always be) quite suppressed at <0.10 and 0.04 g/L, respectively.
So this essay is not an ableist brag about having an immune system when others are less fortunate. Rather it’s an astonished brag that even I, a leukemia patient on prolonged immune-suppressing treatment, have enough of an immune system to take care of me when I need it and leave some antibodies around as proof. We are not as fragile as we think. The human body is an analog system, not a digital one. Our immune system is a gradient of competence and functionality, not an on/off switch. If I truly had no immune system, I would be dead before sundown.
I am unvaccinated, by the way. Initially I declined the Covid-19 injections because studies show that rituximab patients cannot generate an antibody response to vaccination for six months following rituximab treatment. Today my reasons for not vaccinating (besides now having natural immunity) are because I don’t consider the safety profile on these investigational injections to be acceptable or fully disclosed, and because Omicron is a head cold, and because I am well stocked with the safe, effective early treatments for Covid-19 as outlined by the FLCCC doctors.
(I also hold a degree in biology with post-graduate coursework in molecular biology. So before you start incanting your memorized liturgy on the official “science,” please go read my last essay explaining how you are probably trapped in mass psychosis.)
The Kinexus SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Study
On a quiet street in south Vancouver, at the Kinexus Bioinformatics offices, Dr. Steven Pelech has been conducting a clinical trial that is revealing the prevalence of natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in British Columbia and beyond. It turns out natural immunity is more common than we have been led to believe.
“Our own work is clearly showing us that about 90% of the 3,500 people that we have now tested have varying degrees of natural immunity from previous exposures to SARS-CoV-2,” Dr. Pelech said in an email to me January 9, 2022.
The Kinexus antibody test is by far the most sophisticated antibody test available in Canada. It tracks 41 of the best markers identified by Dr. Pelech’s team, covering 10 of the 28 viral proteins encoded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Because this test has not yet been approved by Health Canada, people must enroll in the trial to have access to it.
My Kinexus test cost $70. I pricked my finger at home and mailed my dried blood sample to the Vancouver office using the kit supplied by Kinexus. My test results include a five-page letter from Dr. Pelech with general information about the study and natural immunity, plus an interpretation of my specific antibody profile.
My results also include an image of my own 41-marker immunoblot, plus images of 35 other immunoblots from Covid-recovered patients for comparison, and 10 immunoblots of Covid-negative patients (the controls). In other words, it was a semi-quantitative test result, and quite mesmerizing when you start decoding the images. I think my antibodies are adorable! Time for wallet-size photos?
By comparison, the $75 Covid-19 antibody test offered by LifeLabs covers antibodies of a single protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the nucleocapsid protein, and yields just a ‘reactive’ or ‘non-reactive’ test result. So, not a quantitative analysis.
As described in the key below, the first three rows of each Kinexus immunoblot (A-C) pertain to spike protein. The remaining three rows (D-F) are mapped for antibodies to nine additional viral proteins, including nucleocapsid and membrane proteins. The dark spot you see in the F7 location on all immunoblots is a control peptide that ensures the test reagents are working properly.
Four of the 41 markers can be tricky to detect on a dried blood sample (A6, B7, C6, D7). In those cases, a live blood sample collected at the Kinexus headquarters in Vancouver may provide more information. But on my immunoblot, three of those four markers show strong signal, and the fourth is weak but detectable. Go antibodies!
But enough of my gushing. Let’s get down to the important stuff, like why we should care about natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
The Miracle of Natural Immunity
Dr. Pelech, who is also a professor in the Neurology Division at University of British Columbia’s Department of Medicine, says this in his letter to trial participants:
“Actual infection by the virus itself actually confers the best protection against future infections by other SARS-CoV-2 mutant strains and related viruses. Naturally acquired immunity is broader in the numbers of different proteins that are targeted by antibodies in SARS-CoV-2, the range of types of antibodies types generated (i.e., IgA, IgG, IgM), and the establishment of immune memory such that the immunity may last for years and even decades. By contrast, vaccine-induced immunity is targeted against just the spike protein of the virus, tends to result in primarily IgG class antibodies that are in lower concentrations in lungs and airway spaces, and apparently wanes very significantly in efficacy by 6 months after double vaccination.”
“Individuals with natural immunity from previous exposure and recovery from COVID-19 are at least 100-times less likely to be hospitalized than people that have not been previously infected with the virus or have been double vaccinated 6 months before.”
And he is critical of vaccine mandates and passports, which do not currently recognize natural immunity:
“Furthermore, most of the over 3,000 people that we have tested already have appreciable antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and do not really need to subject themselves to the risks of injury associated with the vaccines. Double vaccinated individuals are now recognized to still get and transmit SARS-CoV-2, and if they develop COVID-19, their viral loads are just as high as in unvaccinated people that get COVID-19. Therefore, the imposition of vaccine passports and mandatory vaccination is both discriminatory and unnecessary.”
Dr. Pelech is not alone in his views about the power and superiority of natural immunity. This ever-growing Brownstone Institute article now cites 144 studies affirming the power of naturally acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
Harvard medical school professor and epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff has also been weighing on the importance of natural immunity throughout the Covid pandemic.
In addition to his Kinexus research and his UBC faculty duties, Dr. Pelech is also the Chair of the Scientific and Medical Advisory Committee of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance—an organization of independent Canadian doctors, scientists and health care practitioners. In this recent interview below, he discusses at length the science behind natural antibody immunity, the Covid vaccines, and the consequences of ill-conceived Covid policies that don’t appear to be based in science.
For information on the Kinexus SARS-CoV-2 antibody study or to enroll, you can try emailing info@kinexus.ca . However, the Kinexus office has been so overwhelmed with people wanting to participate, that they temporarily halted further enrollment last month to get caught up.
In a future essay I’ll look at the strange war of erasure the official Covid narrative is waging against centuries of established science around natural immunity, including the World Health Organization secretly changing the definition of “Herd Immunity” in October 2021 to now pretend it can only be achieved via vaccination.
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Kim Goldberg is a Vancouver Island writer and the author of eight books. Her latest is Devolution, poems and fables of ecopocalypse (Caitlin Press, 2020). Twitter: @AlsoGoldberg
Congratulations, Kim, on your immunity—and remission! This was a great post. Thank you for sharing.
Another really informative post, Kim. Your personal story is fascinating - and a relief to get this news. The way you weave it into the larger political and medical issues around Covid is excellent. I had not heard of Pelech's work until reading this.