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Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

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Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For spike proteins. Not for the other targets you get with natural immunity.

> For spike proteins. Not for the other targets you get with natural immunity From the article: "the new evidence shows that protective antibodies generated in response to an mRNA vaccine will target a broader range of SARS-CoV-2 variants carrying 'single letter' changes in a key portion of their spike protein compared to antibodies acquired from an infection." The study discussed in the article unequivocally states…

> unequivocally states that vaccine-induced immunity is more robust than that from infection.

It absolutely does not make such a strong claim - a more accurate takeaway is that vaccination using the current mRNA based formulations induces an immune response highly targeted toward the S protein RBD. This has not been conclusively proven to provide better or worse protection than immunity acquired through natural infection.

> At first glance, the RBD targeting of the vaccine sera neutralization might seem likely to increase susceptibility to viral mutations, but the rest of our results SUGGEST that this MAY not be the case.

> We found that the specificity of the mRNA-1273 vaccine-induced RBD-binding antibody response often narrows over time. In contrast, the infection-elicited RBD-binding antibody response often broadens over time

> The vaccinated individuals in our study were relatively young (18–55 years) and healthy, whereas the convalescent individuals were older (23–76 years, median 56) with a range of comorbidities (13).

> Additionally, we did not examine effects of mutations or deletions to the N-terminal domain of the spike protein, which can also affect neutralization by vaccine sera (7).

> Our experiments assayed binding of antibodies to isolated RBD expressed by yeast, and so cannot capture mutational effects on trimer conformation or antibodies with quaternary epitopes

> Evidence from multiple experimental studies showing that single RBD point mutations can lead to resistance to neutralizing convalescent plasma from multiple donors suggests that specific single mutants may be able to evade spike-targeting vaccinal immunity in many individuals and rapidly lead to spread of vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2. [1]

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've been proposing for a few months. Get the vaccine and then get the delta variant a few weeks later to crush it and then be super immune for future variants that jet off of that one.

Do you have evidence that this is the best course of action?

Well the obvious problems with it is that it's hard to tell you've been infected and you need to quarantine for the entire duration until you are sure you've been infected and have recovered.

Apart from that, if the protection from a vaccine is temporary then there's no reason to believe your immune system will learn anything from an infection it can already handle. That part of the immune response takes a while and may never succeed if the virus is long gone before then.

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to get a booster. The only people pushing that are government officials who are running counter to scientific advice.

Can you provide sources?

WHO Says No Conclusive Evidence On Need For Booster Shots

https://www.axios.com/who-data-covid-booster-shots-inconclus...

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#126
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a good explanation of why.[1] There are several intranasal coronavirus vaccines in test. There's only one approved nasal vaccine now, for anything: FluMist. It's not recommended for people over 50. There have been previous failures. Intranasal vaccines are hard to make work. Think of the current mRNA vaccines as a minimum viable product. The basic formulation was computed days after the virus was sequenced and…

This raises an interesting question: is someone who is waiting for an effective intranasal vaccine to get something more like sterilizing immunity, and foregoing the less-effective vaccine meanwhile, anti-vax?

That only seems like an interesting question if you view anti-vax as some kind of ethical group.

If you choose to define it more literally as the people that are against taking any particular vaccine in common use then it's vacuously true.

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#127
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know - I consider getting vaccinated to be a matter of common courtesy to those you're going to be interacting with now. I don't feel like thanking folks for only kicking - and not murdering - the adorable puppy at this point. Those who have been advised not to get vaccinated due to immune issues or other medical reasons I completely get - but everyone else is basically saying "I think preserving my pride by…

The first principle for vaccines to be administered ethically is that the benefit must be outweigh the risk. As trials have not completed and more information on vaccine side-effects is yet to be accumulated, this risk/benefit can be assessed only speculatively. For instance, this[1] study suggests that the risk of Myocarditis from COVID in young men is six times higher from an infection than from a vaccination. If w…

What the linked study [1] is saying is that unvaccinated people who get COVID-19 are even more likely to get Myocarditis than vaccinated people; it counters the allegation that people should not get vaccinated because of the risk of Myocarditis.

Even if the vaccine increased the risk (it doesn’t), the risk of COVID-19 is orders of magnitude higher than the risk of the Myocarditis heart condition.

There have been, from the total of 12,910,312 18-24 year-old people vaccinated, [2] about 229 cases of this rare heart disease (and, in almost all cases, the person was discharged from the hospital the same day with a clean bill of health) That means the vaccine has under a 0.002% chance of causing a very rare but not fatal heart condition. [3]

COVID-19, on the other hand, has an overall 1.66% chance of killing someone (38,043,754 cases, 629,644 deaths). [4]

I would rather take a 0.002% non-fatal risk than a 1.66% fatal risk.

Sources:

[1] i.e. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v... “Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.”

[2] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/evidence-grows-st...

[4] https://samiam.org/COVID-19/ derived from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, vaccines only target spike protein, while a previous infection will cause your body to produce antibodies for a much larger set of targets on the virus, which in practice leads to a more robust immunity. This is supported by data from Israel and some recent studies No, it does not. The data from Israel only supports the claim that immunity from infection is longer lasting than from the vaccine, which shoul…

Honestly I have yet to see any convincing scientific evidence that is free from confounding factors which suggests that there is waning immunity. And there's reason to believe from HCoV-229E that immunity against coronaviruses is actually durable and that reinfection is due to mutation and immune escape. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

Thank you. I don’t understand why more people won’t argue like you do. We have 4 endemic human CoVs. Why not learn from the experience we had there?

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, vaccines only target spike protein, while a previous infection will cause your body to produce antibodies for a much larger set of targets on the virus, which in practice leads to a more robust immunity. This is supported by data from Israel and some recent studies No, it does not. The data from Israel only supports the claim that immunity from infection is longer lasting than from the vaccine, which shoul…

From the last link: "Conclusions: This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection a…

Hmm. This smells of literal survivor bias. The group that survives the delta variant is a smaller set than all who got infected while all vaccinated persons survived, even ones that wouldn’t have survived without the vaccine.

Re: Immunity Generated from Covid-19 Vaccines Differs from an Infection

#130
post #103

The spike protein targeting antibodies produced by the vaccine do indeed target a wider range of spike mutations than the spike protein antibodies from previous infection. However, vaccines only target spike protein, while a previous infection will cause your body to produce antibodies for a much larger set of targets on the virus, which in practice leads to a more robust immunity. This is supported by data from Isra…

> while a previous infection will cause your body to produce antibodies for a much larger set of targets on the virus, which in practice leads to a more robust immunity. That is simply not a statement you can make without supporting evidence. Your immune systems binds to irrelevant targets all the time . People normally got measles once, but lots of people got it multiple times. It is entirely possible that your immu…

> People normally got measles once, but lots of people got it multiple times

Is there a good reference for the percentage of people who did?

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