Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a program that's immune

to contamination from inaccurate data and suspicious statistics, and I'm Tim Halford.

US Congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican politician representing South Carolina, recently

appeared on Fox News, claiming people previously infected by COVID had significantly better

immunity to the disease than those who were vaccinated.

In some studies that I have read, natural immunity gives you 27 times more protection against

future COVID infection than a vaccination.

She's referring to a study that drew from a patient database in Israel.

But having this smurched the vaccines on Fox News, she was quick to praise them on CNN

shortly afterwards.

I've been a proponent of vaccinations and wearing masks when we need to.

Well she wouldn't be the first politician to tell different audiences what they wanted

to hear, but we were curious about this dramatic claim that prior infection is so much more

effective against being infected than vaccination is.

Given how many people have been infected, the more protection this infection provides against

the repeat performance, the better, but 27 times better than a vaccine, we had questions.

And so I put them to Dr. Maria Sundaram, infectious disease epidemiologist and associate research

scientist at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin, and Jennifer Dowd, professor

of demography and population health at the University of Oxford, and editor-in-chief

of the dear pandemic COVID science communication campaign.

Jennifer Dowd told me that the data from Israel ran counter to what other studies were showing.

It's the only study that's really shown any benefit of prior infection over vaccination

...