Coronavirus
Professor sues over CA school’s vaccine mandate, says he’s ‘naturally immune’ to COVID
A California professor is suing his school’s officials over a COVID-19 mandate, saying that he already contracted the virus and is “naturally immune.”
Aaron Kheriaty, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine, filed a lawsuit Aug. 18, saying he got sick with COVID-19 in July 2020.
The University of California said in July 2021 that all faculty, staff and students will be required to be vaccinated against COVID two weeks before they’re expected to be on campus for the fall semester.
“In fighting off the virus, his body created a robust natural immunity to every antigen on the COVID-19 virus, not just the spike protein of the virus as happens with the COVID-19 vaccines,” the lawsuit states. “Nevertheless, UCI has told Plaintiff that he cannot return to his teaching position unless he receives a COVID-19 vaccine. Thus, UC is treating him differently by refusing to readmit him to campus when other individuals who are considered immune to the virus are being admitted back simply because their immunity was created by a vaccine.”
McClatchy News didn’t immediately receive a response to a request for comment from the University of California Office of the President.
A June 2021 study found that being reinfected with COVID-19 is rare but there are higher risks for some, McClatchy News reported.
A study of more than 9,000 medical records of people who had severe COVID-19 found that 63 people or less than 1% got the disease again in an average of 3.5 months after testing positive for the first time.
Another recent study out of Kentucky showed patients with prior COVID-19 infections who remained unvaccinated were more than twice as likely to get reinfected than fully vaccinated ones, McClatchy News reported earlier this month.
Overall, while more research needs to be done to compare the level of protection afforded by infection compared to vaccination, experts still recommend getting a shot even after you’ve been infected.
“There’s nothing deleterious about getting a boost to an immune response that you’ve had before,” Dr. Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, told The New York Times. “You could get an actually even better immune response by boosting whatever immunity you had from the first infection by a vaccine.”
According to the lawsuit, Kheriaty is “already naturally immune to the virus” and “less likely to infect other individuals than are people who have been vaccinated.” The suit calls the vaccine mandate “irrational” and that “by targeting people who have had the virus but remain unvaccinated, the mandate unfairly singles out one unpopular group for disparate treatment.”
Infections have continued to spike across the country, fueled by vaccine hesitancy and the delta variant, which is the dominant strain in the U.S. COVID-19 cases across the U.S. have risen 18% in the past two weeks, and hospitalizations have increased 18% over that same period as of Sept. 2, according to The New York Times.
More than 205 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for 61.9% of the population, as of Sept. 2, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 174 million eligible people are fully vaccinated.
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