The Covid Screwtape Letters — Part 13: The Heresy of Healing Oneself

In Which the Body’s Own Triumph Is Declared a Threat to Doctrine, and Only the Patented Potion May Save the Blessed

Part 1 (origins), Part 2 (masks), Part 3 (lockdowns), Part 4 (the new normal), Part 5 (plexiglass), Part 6 (quarantines), Part 7 (social distancing), Part 8 (swabs), Part 9 (essential workers), Part 10 (hypocrisy), Part 11 (Inflated Deaths), Part 12 (hospital overload)

My Dearest Uncle Screwtape,

You see it clearly, as always. Natural immunity is dangerous to our project not because it fails, but because it works too well without us.

A man who has faced a virus, recovered, and walked away with quiet confidence is a man who may begin to doubt his need for my daily bulletins.

That will never do.

From the beginning, I sensed that recovery would have to be treated as a problem, not a success. The textbooks—those tiresome relics—were against us: “infection confers lasting protection,” “memory cells persist,” “recovered individuals rarely suffer severe disease upon re-exposure.” Even the Old Me, speaking in more candid days, had opined that “natural infection is the mother of all vaccines.” Inconvenient, that.

So we did what any sensible bureaucrat does with an awkward relative: we pretended not to know him. When asked about prior infection, we shrugged: “We just don’t know.” When data piles grew high, we raised the bar: “We don’t know for how long.” When studies showed protection equal to or greater than the vaccine, we waved a hand: “But vaccination is safer and more predictable.”

(We did not, of course, dwell on the fact that for the already immune, the only thing vaccination could “add” was risk—a point best left to fringe cranks and censored clinicians.)

You would have admired our methods. We refused to let any “proof of recovery” count as a ticket to normal life. A positive antibody test? Irrelevant. Documented prior infection? Nice story, still needs the shot. We wrote passports, passes, and mandates as if the virus had only two possible interactions with a human: jabbed or unclean. Europe’s dalliance with recognizing natural immunity we quietly dismissed as provincial weakness.

Inside the fort, we handled dissent with that charming new instrument: platform policy. A paper demonstrating durable post-infection immunity could still exist in the journals, of course—we are not barbarians—but if a Makary, a Bhattacharya, or Atlas, or any other inconvenient scholar tried to speak directly to the laity about it, we saw to it that their words acquired a yellow triangle: “misleading,” “out of context,” “vaccine hesitant.” Stone walls and dungeons are so passé; a content warning does the job with far less paperwork.

I confess, my favorite moment came when we found ourselves short of vaccine doses early on. At that time, a few tiresome voices suggested we prioritize the never-infected—that we might save more lives by first inoculating those without any immunity at all. “Why give two life preservers to a man already ashore,” they asked, “while another is still drowning?” A compelling image, I admit.

We solved it elegantly: we ignored the distinction.

Whether a person had recovered or not, we treated them as equally nude before the virus and equally in need of our sacrament. Millions of doses went into arms already teeming with antibodies, while others with no defenses waited. A few died waiting. Alas. But the charts looked tidy, and tidiness is next to godliness in policy circles.

Mandates were our crowning achievement. Nothing quite so thoroughly dethrones natural immunity as criminalizing its sufficiency. When nurses who had already passed through the fire were told, “You are unsafe until jabbed,” and then dismissed for refusing, we sent a clear catechism to the world: Only immunity we can count, control, and renew on schedule really exists. The rest is superstition.

You ask if I fear the accumulating evidence. Not really. The more obvious it becomes that recovery provides stout protection, the more we can retreat into a fog of phrases: “complex,” “evolving,” “not yet fully understood.” Some years hence, the same officials who smirked at natural immunity may quietly admit it, in footnotes and appendices. They might even claim we always knew. Memory, like antibodies, can be trained.

In the meantime, we still have our greatest ally: the human craving to be on the approved team. Ignoring natural immunity has become, as you say, a kind of party badge. To acknowledge it now would feel like betrayal to many of our most loyal disciples. They will cling to the denial long after the data have buried it, just as a superstitious pilgrim clings to his purchased relic even after the bones are revealed as chicken.

And if the recovered grow restless? We can always offer them a compromise: “You may have your natural immunity, of course. Just line up for your booster anyway. It’s safer. And it’s required.”

Yours in the business of selling what their bodies already own,
Dr. F

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My Dear Dr. F,

Very good. Remember: your goal is not merely that they neglect the ancient truth, but that they feel guilty for remembering it. Make them apologize for trusting their own recovered bodies. Then they will never again trust themselves without your permission.

When they forget that healing once granted them freedom, they will accept that only your favor does.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

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My Dear Dr. F,

There is one more angle, my boy, one more twist of the knife that I must commend you on — your skillful reframing of recovery as a liability. Observe the monstrous elegance: you took the class of people who were statistically the safest to be around — those who had beaten the virus with the full symphony of antibodies, memory B cells, CD4s, CD8s, and all the cunning machinery of the adaptive immune system — and you rebranded them as “unclean.”

It is a feat worthy of the medieval Church’s finest indulgence merchants.

In those days, simple peasants boiled willow bark for pain, chewed elderberry for fever, and trusted their bodies to remember the plague it had survived. This posed a grave threat to our coffers, so naturally we condemned these remedies as the superstitions of witches and hedge-healers. We declared the common flora “dangerous,” not because they failed, but because they succeeded without priestly permission.

You, my brilliant pupil, repeated this ancient triumph on a global scale.

The Rockefeller and Nature studies, the Israeli megadata, the Cleveland Clinic’s awkward “zero reinfection” finding — each one was a sprig of forbidden herb, a tincture that might cure without your pharmaceutical sacraments. And so you did what all good inquisitors do: you convinced the people that their own bodies were the enemy. That their God-given defenses were inferior to the spike-protein novena. That immunity which had endured wars, famines, and centuries of pestilence was now a quaint relic, like a family recipe or a superstition from the old country.

Astonishing. Even our cousins in the Middle Ages never managed to outlaw immunity itself.

But you have made the laity believe what no virologist would have dared utter five years ago: that a recovered child must still receive the ritual injection to “qualify” for school; that a convalescent nurse must kneel for the sacrament or be banished from the ward; that the very people whose blood neutralizes the virus with unprompted elegance must still present their shoulder as if their body had failed.

Keep this narrative alive, dear boy. If ever the public realizes that the most robust immunity comes from their own flesh, your whole cathedral will collapse like a papier-mâché reliquary in a rainstorm.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

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Dearest Uncle Screwtape,

Your insights, as always, widen my grin. Indeed, I have discovered that the greatest ally in suppressing natural immunity is not censorship, nor mandates, nor even propaganda — it is the public’s craving for uncomplicated villains.

How they love the dichotomy I’ve given them: vaccinated saints on one side, unvaccinated sinners on the other. The entire machinery of immunology — the nuance of T-cell repertoires, the architecture of mucosal defenses, the breathtaking longevity of memory plasma cells humming away in bone marrow — all of it collapses nicely into a cartoon morality play.

Once the theater was established, the rest came easily:

• A previously infected truck driver with high neutralizing titers?
  A heretic.

• A triple-dosed executive with a fresh PCR-positive swab?
  A hero.

• A 20-year-old athlete who recovered and now faces a one-in-6,000 risk of myocarditis if forced to comply?
  An acceptable casualty.

And best of all — a recovered grandmother denied entry to visit her own dying sister because she lacked the proper QR code? That, Uncle, was when I knew the conditioning had taken root.

The pilgrim’s pass mattered more than her antibodies.

The ritual outweighed reality.

The sacrament defeated the cure.

What elation I felt when universities expelled recovered students, when soldiers were court-martialed for refusing a medically unnecessary dose, when hospital systems fired thousands of convalescent nurses then spent millions hiring temporary replacements! It was as though the world itself were performing a passion play in my honor.

As for the science — ah, the science! Anyone paying attention could see natural immunity outshining vaccination: lower reinfection rates, stronger cross-variant protection, slower antibody decay, more robust T-cell memory. But instead of grappling with the evidence, public health simply declared the topic too confusing for the public, as though millions of ordinary people had not understood chickenpox immunity for generations.

A perfect stroke of condescension masquerading as expertise.

And the coup de grâce? When faced with mountains of data showing the superiority of natural immunity — data from Israel, Qatar, Denmark, Austria, Italy, the UK, the NIH, Emory, Rockefeller, Nature — our highest sages convened a private straw poll. Four voices, two votes, and presto! The fate of millions was sealed. No need for evidence when one has consensus from the inner circle.

Your maxim rings true, Uncle: It is easier to erase a truth than to explain one.

And so the forbidden cure remains forbidden. The healed remain suspect. The boosters continue their pilgrimage. And the sheep, once taught to distrust the very bodies they inhabit, will never again feel fully “safe” without our blessing.

Ever your loyal acolyte,
Dr. F.