More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans have some immunity against the virus — either by vaccination or infection, or a combination of both. But there have been some rare cases in which certain unvaccinated people seem to have been able to dodge the virus despite being repeatedly exposed to it. This has raised the question of whether it is possible that some people are simply immune or resistant to COVID-19 without having had the virus or a vaccine.
Scientists have been trying to understand if such a resistance to COVID-19 exists and how it would work. Studying these cases, researchers say, could help the development of new vaccines and therapeutics against the disease, which has now taken more than 990,000 American lives.
“It’s been a hard thing to talk about publicly because you say things and then people go, ‘Oh, that must be me, because I haven’t been infected yet,’ when in fact, you know, you may not have been infected because you just got lucky so far,” Shane Crotty, a virologist and professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told Yahoo News.
Crotty said he and other experts have been cautious to talk about this topic because it is something that is still being studied, and for which there are no clear answers yet.
