One of the biggest issues with this discussion is that we call these current round of therapeutics, "vaccines". They aren't. They don't prevent infection. They don't prevent transmission. At best, they reduce symptoms.
Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
261–270 of 371 posts
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#262The term ”survivor bias” is usually used metaphorically, but in this case it applies literally. Putting in some caveats about the risks associated with infection is not enough. This is a garbage analysis that should never have been accepted for publication.
I'm fully vaccinated as is my whole family but you're the one showing bias here. The data is the data. Obviously the data set is only recovered patients. That has no bearing on the analysis. It's not a recommendation to go get infected or anything ridiculous like that. It's not a recommendation of anything. It's just data.
It’s math for the sake of math with no actual scientific value.
Here, let me help:
“Car crash survivors show greater seat belt compliance than people who watch a seat belt PSA.” Useless analysis.
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The clots are considered extremely rare - there have been 417 reported cases and 72 deaths - after 24.8 million first doses and 23.9 million second doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK. That's 72 deaths among millions. You're trying to describe COVID as "given low risk to an otherwise well person", but you're still off by many orders of magnitude. Using this site[1] we see that he current 0-59 death rate is 0…
> we see that he current 0-59 death rate is 0.2% I made a statement about the percentage of deaths among people over 50 (not death rate). Computing an IFR (infection fatality rate) is difficult because so many infections are unrecorded. For example, consider this paper[1]: > We found that these antibodies were present in 42.4% of the individuals tested and that the majority of these infections, which were generally m…
In order for those numbers to align to such a point where vaccines are more deadly we'd need to either have 1000x more vaccine related deaths or 1000x more infections undetected. Which do you think it would be?
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
The discussion on that post seems to support the grandparent, not you. Also, the article it's talking about says > 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. I.e. the current vaccines are not laser…
Note that the article was talking about the spike protein. I believe natural immunity also can target parts of SARS-CoV-19 that are not part of the spike protein. In that sense vaccines are more focused, but the focus is on a part of the virus that is critical for getting into cells. There are limits to how far the spike protein can mutate and still do its job and the vaccine immunity covers a large part of that spac…
> Note that the article was talking about the spike protein. I believe natural immunity also can target parts of SARS-CoV-19 that are not part of the spike protein.
This is my understanding as well.
Vaccine-derived immunity is more broad with respect to potential mutation of the spike protein/"receptor binding domain". Natural immunity is more broad with respect to the entire virus, as antibodies target areas other than the spike protein itself.
I believe that antibodies specific to the spike protein more significantly reduce the chance of initial infection, while antibodies specific to other areas of the virus are more effective at reducing the chance of developing symptoms.
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it would be comparing the improvement from a vaccine to the better natural immunity versus the risks from a vaccine. I don't know that this is obvious. For example, a hundredth of a percent improvement is 1 in 10k. And an already exposed person would be expected to have a less severe reaction if exposed again. Also some people worry about certain aspects of the vaccine. Did you know that it took over 25 years…
> Did you know that it took over 25 years to develop a lipid delivery system for mrna vaccines that wasn't toxic in animal tests? I'm not sure why the length of time it took to reach an accomplishment should undermine said accomplishment. They killed a lot of animals before they landed on the moon. > Or that they have concerns about accumulation of these lipids in organs like the liver? Who is they? How can you quant…
EDIT: My reply above was in regards to vaccines for those who already have caught covid and presumably have natural immunity, immunity that looks like it is better than vaccine immunity. The equation for those people to get the vaccine is different than the equation for the non-vaccinated.
I listed questions some people may have. I don't have all the answers. I consider that running numbers for stuff like this involves a certain amount of guesswork, things that can't be well qualified.
> I mean, by definition being sick is not being healthy. You'll need to expand this a bit for it to make sense.
I was thinking of the many healthy people who got very sick (collapsing, bedridden, etc) for a short time (24-36 hours) after getting the vaccine. Does that mean their immune system was already primed and went on the attack? I've heard that can cause autoimmune reactions - the immune system attacking something that is part of the body accidentally (collateral damage).
> How can you quantify and qualify this risk?
I did the best I could for myself, trying to prioritize. I may be more comfortable than most working with ambiguity. The biggest factors obviously were known covid risks based my age and health, numbers from the vaccine trials (which I wish were more easily available) and an awareness of all these other less quantifiable things (a lot of reading and learning).
EDIT: If I had confirmation that I already had covid my calculations would have changed. I don't know by how much, to be honest! I certainly would have felt substantially less need to get a vaccination, and it looks like science is bearing that out. If I have to deal with a lot of unknowns for a 1 in 10k improvement in my odds after I already have the better natural immunity, I might rather not deal with the unknowns.
There were some adjustments made by authorities, like those around the AZ risk for young women, because the odds didn't favor that treatment for those people. This is all new, and still developing. The number of breakthrough infections in Israel is interesting, for example. Hopefully that doesn't lead to any kind of weird/bad evolution of the virus.
> auto-immune reactions
You are certainly correct that covid includes the risk of autoimmune reactions, also! And other risks. As time goes on we have better numbers for covid, and better numbers for the vaccines. I made my decision with the best numbers that I could find at the time.
On the topic of vaccine autoimmune reactions in general, I looked into it and it was difficult to find good data, it looked like the immune system was complicated enough that science doesn't have stuff like that all figured out.
> Again, you're not saying who it is that doesn't do a great job
I'm not saying that I have the answers. These are questions that some vaccine-hesitant people have. Ideally the experts would do a good job of answering them, including admitting where they don't have good answers. Lots of people are resistant to being forced into something through social/financial/government pressure.
I personally assume this is going to reverberate around the world a bit more, waves of decreasing intensity until most of us have been exposed, becoming endemic and not so big a deal (like the other coronaviruses that are endemic). It might be hard to know how much of anything we did made a difference.
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#266What about a person who is vaccinated and then has an asymptotic case? Do they still build up even better immunity? If so, that’s still a great reason to vaccinate.
Wouldn’t the Hoskins effect [1], or “original antigenic sin”, apply in this case? > the propensity of the body's immune system to preferentially utilize immunological memory based on a previous infection when a second slightly different version of that foreign pathogen (e.g. a virus or bacterium) is encountered. This leaves the immune system "trapped" by the first response it has made to each antigen, and unable to m…
Probably not. B cells can return to germinal centers and undergo further affinity maturation.
Hoskins effect does not block this process, but may slow it down. If the original antibody is still effective, no problem.
Now, if the virus mutates to completely escape existing antibodies, we might have a different story. But in that story, the vaccinated are probably better off than the natural infection crowd.
The vaccine targets a highly conserved region of the RBD; it is largely essential to bind to ACE2. Mutation there is likely to reduce binding affinity and thus become less infectious / virulent.
Natural immunity however suffers from the problem that the body builds antibodies against other regions that are more prone to mutation. Some of those mutations have been shown to enhance infectiousness. So you could end up with a scenario where non RBD targeted antibodies enhance infectiousness while simultaneously you have slowed affinity maturation.
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the worry with natural infection is if the timing is such to provide durable immunity. But it’s not like the vaccines have had 5 years of trials to determine the best wait between the 2 and 3 doses so kind of a moot point.
Why 5 years? Why not 1? Why not 50? What's so special to people about 5 years? I keep hearing people say "it hasn't been tested long enough" followed by "I'd take it in about 5 to 10 years" which is a HUGE difference. Is it just that "time has passed", because a year has passed since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was first given to test subjects. But I guess it's up to people - their body, their choice. Even though we…
>Why 5 years? Why not 1? Why not 50? What's so special to people about 5 years?
Clinical trials are conducted over many years (rather than just 1) for historical safety reasons[1]
>There is a faction of fools out there who resist being a part of society, but claim all of its privileges. These are sub-human individuals
This is hate speech, especially considering the disproportionate rates of black and hispanic people who are unvaccinated.
[1]https://www.brightfocus.org/clinical-trials/how-clinical-tri...
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't just some random fact. It's extremely relevant to the pandemic. Knowing that previously infected people maintain immunity high levels against variants is important for people making informed decisions about their situations. What GP is really worried about is this fact being misused to incentivize people NOT to get the vaccine.
> This isn't just some random fact. It's extremely relevant to the pandemic. I don't disagree with it being relevant but if one reads just the title of this article and had previously been infected they may believe they do not need to be vaccinated, but that isn't the case. According to this study folks who were infected previously are more than 2x as likely to be reinfected than those who were previously infected an…
Reducing a 1% chance of re-infection to .5% does not imply that population needs to get vaccinated.
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#269This sounds conflicting I read somewhere else earlier today, that the immunity you get from the actual disease is tailored towards the specific variant/strain. Whereas the vaccines (at least the mRNA ones) confer immunity against multiple strains.
Why? The vaccine is literally a carbon copy of one of the early variants. It just makes the protein without infection. This whole idea that the vaccine has magical properties to substantially exceed natural immunity on basic dimensions is straightforward BS.
I meant the article said that the actual disease confers greater immunity than a vaccine.
While that might be true, that immunity would only be good for one particular strain of the virus as opposed to the vaccine which provides you protection against a wider variety of strains.
One can argue that the protection from the vaccine is better in the sense, that it protects you from a wider variety of Covid strains.
Also, just so you know, that while the (mRNA) vaccine replicates protein, it is still your body and immune system which reacts to this protein and creates the antibodies.
So even in case of the vaccine, strictly speaking the immunity is natural.
Re: Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people in high risk groups should get it, i.e., the elderly and people with weak immune systems or other health issues. Those who are strong health wise ok, they stand a good chance. That said, I am totally against this blanket insistence on passports. There may be some situations which warrant vaccinations where the subject has no acquired immunity, health workers, etc. But being denied access to govt servic…
> But being denied access to govt services because you lack the papers is not a good thing. What gov services are people being denied? legit question - I hear this, but unsure what is being referred to. How about "vaccine proof or wear a mask" to get/access govt services/buildings/etc?
In ny country, the library for example. Also some public baths.
But my main concern is the restrictions on freedom of movement.