In largest real world analysis of its kind, Researchers from Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University compared people who had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to unvaccinated individuals who had recovered from the virus.
They found that participants with natural immunity were up to 13 times less likely to contract coronavirus than those who were given two jabs of the vaccine. They found that fully vaccinated people were much more likely to have a 'breakthrough' coronavirus infection than people with natural immunity for the disease.
Overall participants who were double vaccinated were 5.96 times more likely to be infected and 7.13 times more likely to experience symptoms including cough, fever and shortness of breath.
The Israeli team also looked at the likelihood of vaccination after three months. They found the likelihood of infections at 13.06 times higher among vaccine-immunized individuals and they were 27 times more likely to experience symptoms.
The study which was published on pre-print server medRxiv.org was conducted after the Delta variant became dominant in Israel, which has been shown to more easily evade vaccines than older strains.
The researchers looked at more than 800,000 people split into three groups. This included people who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine and never had coronavirus infection, unvaccinated people who previously been infected, and people had the virus and has also received a single dose of the vaccine.
Speaking to Fox News host Tucker Carlson Friday, John Hopkins University professor Marty Makary said that this study affirms the results from 14 other studies.
Makary said natural immunity is "effective and durable." He said "a lot of public health officials have been afraid to acknowledge that because they're worried people will just go out there and get the infection and not the vaccine."
Makary urged public health officials to be more honest with people about the efficacy of natural immunity. "The hesitancy with vaccination is because we've not been honest with things," he said. "We've not been honest about natural immunity. We've not been honest with the data..... We gotta acknowledge natural immunity is real."