>Because it's a terrible policy prescription. If natural immunity is acceptable, what proportion of the unvaccinated-uninfected population will just take the risk?
You're making a calculation not regarding health, but regarding public reaction. The problem is that the public health community sucks as far as making these calculations go; I don't think I need to list all the missteps here. IMHO, they know a lot about epidemiology, nothing about the public. So it's best to just make the right policy and not to try 4D chess with the public, that tends to backfire.
Just about anyone who has remained unvaccinated so far is already taking the risk you pointed out*. No point in spending resources chasing recovering patients we don't really have to vaccinate right now.
Now I don't agree with using antibody test results (these kits aren't standardized, so the relation between immunity and the results isn't clear), but an actual record of recovery should do. As the article notes, that's what many other countries in the world do.
* Excluding the very few people who actually have a good reason to not vaccinate due to certain extremely rare immune system ailments.
I don't disagree with any of that, but I would argue that public is _necessarily_ the intersection of individual health and public opinion. Policy makers can't just ignore public reception of/reaction to their prescriptions, since their goal is improvement the aggregation of outcomes across the entire population. Ignoring those second order effects is just as much a policy choice as trying to account for them, and not IMO a priori more likely to result in a better outcome. Might've in this case? We might've also got COVID parties.
You're making a calculation not regarding health, but regarding public reaction. The problem is that the public health community sucks as far as making these calculations go; I don't think I need to list all the missteps here. IMHO, they know a lot about epidemiology, nothing about the public. So it's best to just make the right policy and not to try 4D chess with the public, that tends to backfire.
Just about anyone who has remained unvaccinated so far is already taking the risk you pointed out*. No point in spending resources chasing recovering patients we don't really have to vaccinate right now.
Now I don't agree with using antibody test results (these kits aren't standardized, so the relation between immunity and the results isn't clear), but an actual record of recovery should do. As the article notes, that's what many other countries in the world do.
* Excluding the very few people who actually have a good reason to not vaccinate due to certain extremely rare immune system ailments.