The Biden administration grappled with research suggesting natural immunity was more effective than COVID-19 vaccination shortly before federal vaccine mandates in 2021, admitting the rigor of the massive Israeli study and worrying it might undermine its promotion of one-size-fits-all vaccination, newly released emails show.

The Freedom of Information Act production to Protect the Public's Trust, shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, gives the most compelling evidence to date that federal officials knew their pending mandates were scientifically shaky yet repeatedly asserted in public – misrepresenting federal research – that natural immunity couldn't match vaccine-acquired immunity.

The emails add heft to prior claims by a now-former Food and Drug Administration adviser, going back four years, that the feds ultimately rejected natural immunity as an exemption to vaccine mandates for bureaucratic reasons and kept pushing vaccines on all ages and conditions for the sake of simpler messaging, not science.

They also reaffirm the glaring lack of rigorous research by U.S. institutions on basic questions about SARS-CoV-2 and treatment outcomes, with many of the most important findings coming from abroad. The abnormally high risk of heart inflammation in young people post-vaccination, for example, emerged from Israeli data and institutions.

It's just "more evidence that the public health bureaucracy was ripe for a thorough housecleaning," Protect the Public’s Trust Director Michael Chamberlain told DCNF, blasting officials for trying to "bury what didn’t fit their preferred narrative" and Americans' reliance on "Israeli research for their health information" despite billions in federal funding.

Fauci: natural immunity 'possibly likely' better after 'serious systemic infection'

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, let it slip in a podcast four years ago that top Biden administration officials met with him and other "immunology and virology types" to discuss a possible exemption for natural immunity ahead of COVID vaccine mandates in 2021.

While the pediatrician and vaccine inventor told Just the News the meeting's importance had been exaggerated, Offit elaborated after the 2024 election on the 2021 meeting's details, telling the same podcast "we all basically agreed" on an exemption but "the question was, bureaucratically," how to verify natural immunity.

He also said Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told him at a 2023 meeting that the feds didn't target "high-risk groups" for vaccination because that was too "nuanced" and some at high risk wouldn't get jabbed unless everyone was told to do it.

The Department of Health and Human Services didn't approve Offit's paperwork for a two-year extension of his service on the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, MedPage Today reported last fall. Offit recently made the puzzling claim that half of America has hepatitis B, whose vaccination he strongly supports at birth.

He's a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but also repeatedly questioned Biden administration COVID vaccine recommendations, especially boosters for low-risk groups and an annual shot, and criticized Biden officials for withholding data from VRBPAC.

The newly revealed emails show Fauci telling colleagues including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky that the Israeli study of nearly 800,000 people, which got wide visibility in Science, was "rather impressive."

The study, then a preprint that hadn't gone through peer-review, showed natural immunity was 13 times more protective than Pfizer vaccination against reinfection and 27 times more protective against symptomatic COVID.

Murthy asked how the Israeli study fit with the CDC's in-house Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report study of a few hundred Kentuckians with prior immunity, which found vaccination reduced reinfection risk more than natural recovery. (The Biden administration often used MMWR, also not peer-reviewed, to push weak research that justified its policies.)

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, then a medical professor, mocked the feds for "fishing" for a study to justify its COVID policy on Fox News. A month later, he wrote a Washington Post op-ed touting the Israeli study, which Makary said affirmed earlier findings from Cleveland Clinic and Washington University studies, and scolding Collins for saying the opposite.

Fauci, who based his "rather impressive" conclusion on the Science summary, touted the Israeli data "despite the caveat that it is a retrospective study and the testing was voluntary."

He speculated that people with asymptomatic or mild infections wouldn't have better protection against reinfection than the "fully vaccinated" – two mRNA doses, even then associated with heart inflammation – but "it is conceivable and possibly likely" that recovery from "serious systemic infection" is more protective than full vaccination.

Fauci also used "really rather impressive" to describe findings from a different Israeli study, sent directly to CDC Covid Response Chief Medical Officer John Brooks, that a booster restored waning vaccine effectiveness in Pfizer two-dose recipients. Fauci asked NIAID colleagues to evaluate Brooks' concern that the effect was too "potent" for the short timeframe.

Booster restores waning protection, based on 'FOUR SUBJECTS only'

Collins called the natural-immunity study "somewhat puzzling" because it seems "well-designed" but the 13-times difference suggests the naturally immune didn't have "really serious prior systemic infection" and "may have been less likely to seek testing." He emphasized the Israeli and Kentucky studies both found a post-infection dose improves protection.

"Does CDC have a ready meta-analysis of all of the studies that have compared the immunity from natural infection to vaccination?" Collins asked. "Most of us have been saying up until now that vaccines are actually better for providing immunity – what does the overall synthesis of the data now say?"

Collins' private posture toward immunity from infection versus vaccination is far more measured than his aggressive response to the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors he sought to marginalize in scientific discourse for urging "focused protection" against COVID rather than one-size-fits-all restrictions. Two authors now serve in the Trump administration.

A few days later, Brooks provided a lengthy roundup of research that he admitted was "not a meta-analysis" and questioned whether "we have enough data of the same type yet to embark on a meta-analysis. 

The Israeli paper on natural immunity shows "something is going on here" but so does the Israeli booster paper, Brooks said, before describing a third study on antibody titers following natural immunity versus vaccination. The latter's titers "peak higher" but "decline more swiftly" than the former's after six months: up to 40% a month versus under 5%.

"The good news here is that boosters look like a solution," Brooks said, citing research that found vaccination after infection "produces a larger and more durable antibody response" and a booster following two doses leads to "substantially increased neutralizing antibody levels," though he cautioned the latter was based on "FOUR SUBJECTS only."

The takeaway is both "vaccine and infection are immunizing," and while the latter seems more durable "we want to avoid infection-induced immunity; comes at too great a cost and vaccination is safe," Brooks said. "May[be] this will be a three-dose vaccine after all… [sic]."

He gave senior officials talking points on how to respond to claims that vaccines aren't needed in light of natural immunity's effectiveness.

"We only have epidemiologic data on both forms of immunity out to about 6 months, and we don’t know how much longer and how well infection-induced immunity may protect (i.e., how durable that immunity is)," Brooks said. 

He noted the suspiciously positive Kentucky results the CDC touted were undermined by the Israeli paper that found lower risk of reinfection post-vaccination was "non-significant." 

Protect the Public's Trust had filed a "scientific integrity" complaint with HHS about the CDC's false promotion of the Kentucky study as comparing vaccination with natural immunity alone, rather than vaccination versus no vaccination after infection.

While the first sentence of the press release correctly described the two groups as each having prior infections, the headline and second sentence falsely said it showed vaccination offers "higher protection" than previous infection.