Legal Push: The CDC Must Objectively Examine the Science on Natural Immunity

A group of academic physicians and scientists has taken legal action to subject the CDC's opaque policymaking on this issue to scrutiny by the courts and the public

Greetings, subscribers. In yesterday’s post I explained a few of the (entirely unconvincing) reasons the CDC is ignoring the science on natural immunity. I hinted at the end of the piece that a group of academic physicians and researchers (including this writer) has been applying legal pressure to push the CDC toward transparency and accountability on this issue. As promised, in this post I will describe those efforts in detail. I trust it will be well worth your time to read this post to the end.

As it happens, only two groups of people can take legal action in federal court against the CDC: the agency’s own employees or a lawyer who has received an official response from the CDC to a specific type of petition. As far as I know, the only person right now in the latter category is the lawyer representing me in my case against UC and CA, Aaron Siri and his legal team—the same team that is now taking action against the CDC as described below.

Let’s begin with the legal backstory. In May of this year, the CDC changed its recommendations to loosen restrictions on fully vaccinated individuals. The recommendations did not acknowledge the group of those who have already recovered from Covid and have natural immunity. Siri submitted a letter, with a detailed declaration by my colleague, Dr. Peter McCullough, demanding that the CDC include Covid-recovered individuals in the same category as the vaccinated (full letter and Dr. McCullough’s declaration are available here):

As you can see if you peruse the entire letter and the attached declaration, this document included an extensive review of the robust science on natural immunity for Covid. Subsequent studies since May have only further confirmed the findings summarized in this letter.

In response, the CDC sent a dismissive two-sentence form letter that addressed none of the scientific issues raised in the petitioners’ letter. The CDC thanked Siri for his “interest in 2019 Coronavirus Disease” and provided a link to the policy which Siri had extensively critiqued in his letter:

The upside of this non-responsive response, however, was that it allowed Siri to formally petition the CDC, which he did with a letter on July 6 (full letter here). Here’s the key line:

The action in federal court is only permitted because Siri’s team received the official response from the CDC, regardless of the fact that the response said nothing more than, “please go away because don’t want to talk to you about science.” The CDC did not bother to respond to this July 6 letter even though they were required by law to do so.

Siri’s team sent another letter on Sept 15 delicately pointing this out, and attaching a helpful bibliography of 56 additional studies published on natural immunity since the original letter—studies which only further confirmed their initial case. Here’s the relevant language from this petition:

The CDC finally responded on Sept 17, denying the petition:

This denial was based on one engineered study (the Kentucky study) that the CDC had just published. The Kentucky study did not, however, even examine the relevant comparison groups: vaccinated vs. Covid-recovered. Instead, everyone examined in the study was Covid-recovered: half of these were subsequently vaccinated. Siri’s next letter included a thorough critique and contextualization of this irrelevant study—a transparently engineered bit of research which was so methodologically embarrassing that most vaccine advocates no longer bother to cite it. Siri also pointed out that the CDC’s response made no mention of the 50+ studies that petitioners had summarized and submitted to the CDC for review.

What comes next is the most interesting and informative part. Siri’s team—with help from several academic physicians and scientists from UCLA, UCSF, UCI (this writer), Brown, Stanford, and other institutes—submitted a reply on October 21. I am convinced that this document constitutes the single best summary of the research on natural immunity for Covid yet compiled. The relevant studies are here distilled in 18 readable pages with footnotes and links primary research literature. If you only read one document to get an overview of the science of natural immunity for Covid, I recommend you read this one. The petitioners did the hard work of combing through all the studies and accurately collating and summarizing the findings. The critique in this document of the CDC’s Kentucky study on pages 2-3 is also informative. Here’s a sampling from the first two pages of this document:

The letter includes a partial list of experts prepared to testify in court as to the accuracy of this petition’s summary of the science on natural immunity once legal action is taken against the CDC:

The petition closes with the following warning to the CDC…

Stay tuned here for updates and new developments.