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Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

nih.gov

61–70 of 342 posts

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#61
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing for immunity could easily cost more than the vaccine. Also most people haven't caught it yet, so you'd need to give them the vaccine anyways.

The antibody tests are like $5.

The T cell immunity test is what will be relevant for anyone who was infected a significant amount of time ago, and last I saw those were about $200.

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#62
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The consensus I’m hearing from epidemiologists is the mRNA vaccines should offer better immunity than infection Serious question: How can we possibly know this? I'm all for vaccinations (I'm going in for my second shot this weekend), but I just worry about commentary backed by intuition that doesn't carry sufficient disclaiming.

From my understanding, there are two main reasons. 1) The two spaced exposures. Repeated spaced exposures build a significantly stronger response. 2) Isolation of the spike protein. Just like ML might pick up on a correlated part of the image while learning to recognize things (many examples, no good links), your immune system may learn to react to different parts of the virus. The spike protein is the most unchangin…

> The spike protein is the most unchanging part, and all the vaccine will teach your body to attack.

Does that mean that a natural immunity may offer protection against other coronaviruses that have a different spike protein structure? The logic being that the less targeted defenses built through a natural immunity would latch onto some other commonality?

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The antibody tests are like $5.

Where can I get such a test that is accurate and shows a quantitative number)? Quest charges $80.

I mean, the vaccine in the US is $0, so it's kind of moot, a test will cost more than the vaccine.

I was sort of thinking of the cost of doing the test when I said $5, rather than the retail cost (really, that's what I was thinking about!).

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#65

This was completely expected, since this is the case with the other coronaviruses. People that contracted SARS-CoV-1 still have a strong immune response almost 20 years later.

Saying that coronavirus infections in general produce long-lasting immunity is too strong, I think. For non-SARS coronaviruses (e.g. HCoV-OC43), immunity seems to drop off within a year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1083-1

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#66
post #36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public health profession has lost so much credibility over the last year. No one should feel the need to reverse engineer latent preemptive anticipatory inverted Stockholm syndrome like this, but here we are.

They've lost credibility because of a concerted effort to discredit them. An effort that was initiated specifically by people who didn't want to follow their broadly reasonable medical advice.

There's been plenty of unforced errors on the part of the government agencies. Claiming that masks don't help because they didn't want average citizens to buy them all up and still saying you shouldn't wear a K/N95 mask come to mind. Also, the horrific early failures with broken tests and bans on testing anyone who hadn't been in a specific area of China until it was far too late. Heck, the CDC just this week finally admitted the virus was airborne, something that anyone paying attention knew literally a year ago just from looking at early contact tracing of how the virus spread.

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#67
post #6
post #4

_If_ natural immunity lasts longer than vaccine immunity, does that mean those that have been infected would not need the regular booster shots?

Natural immunity and vaccine immunity are expected to last around the same amount time. This is for the simple reason that the mechanism that generates the immunity is similar. (Natural immunity being a bit more diverse, while vaccine focuses on a single protein.)

Possibly not. I can't really follow most of this, but from the abstract it sounds like the (Pfizer) vaccines don't necessarily trigger a B-cell/T-cell reaction unless you've previously been infected (in which case the vaccines strengthen what was already there due to natural immunity), and that's where long-lasting immunity comes from, since antibodies will eventually degrade over time (we're just not sure how long it would take for that to happen).

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/04/29/scie...

> After one dose, individuals with prior infection showed enhanced T cell immunity, antibody secreting memory B cell response to spike and neutralizing antibodies effective against B.1.1.7 and B.1.351. By comparison, HCW receiving one vaccine dose without prior infection showed reduced immunity against variants. B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 spike mutations resulted in increased, abrogated or unchanged T cell responses depending on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) polymorphisms. Single dose vaccination with BNT162b2 in the context of prior infection with a heterologous variant substantially enhances neutralizing antibody responses against variants.

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#68
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People that contracted SARS-CoV-1 still have a strong immune response almost 20 years later. Could you provide a source for this please?

There are several such studies, all trivially discoverable. Here is one published in Nature last year, where they specifically also studied cross reactivity of SARS-2003 immune response with SARS-2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z Asking for a citation for something so trivially discoverable is a weird flex.

Ridiculing someone for asking for a source for something you think is "trivial" is also a weird flex.

Re: Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19

#69

I’m very surprised that “proof of immunity” isn’t an acceptable alternative to a vaccine for things like travel or work. It seems it’s either vaccine or bust. Anyone know why this is the case?

Everything I've been reading about vaccine passports include some reference to having a positive COVID test more than X period of time in the past as an equivalent to a vaccine. That said, there are few (if any) reasons not to do both, so at least for now I'm okay even if we did only push for vaccines-as-validation.

> That said, there are few (if any) reasons not to do both

If recovery grants equivalent immunity, there's not only no reason to get a vaccine, there's reason to not get any vaccine: However rare complications are from the vaccines, there's no reason to risk them.

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