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Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

bmj.com

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Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#541

Post by refulgentis »

ixacto wrote: post #536
kristjansson wrote: post #525

Because it's a terrible policy prescription. If natural immunity is acceptable, what proportion of the unvaccinated-uninfected population will just take the risk? Half? More? Millions of people will just (continue to) take the risk, get sick, go to hospital, and die (in decreasing proportions), incurring substantial personal and social costs along the way. Accepting only vaccination as evidence of protection reduces…

To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove m…

The line seems to be drawn at socializing the risks of full hospital ICUs in a region

Edit: why the downvote to near-dead? I thought that's what the author emphasized :\

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#542

Post by foolinaround »

advisedwang wrote: post #103
darthvoldemort wrote: post #21

A recent study from Israel said that natural immunity is an order of magnitude better than vaccine-induced immunity against delta variant. I don't know who to believe, but if that's the case, then the narrative of "well they should get vaccinated anyway" is really freaking suspicious. We need deeper research on this, and the fact that they haven't researched this is truly scary.

I mean for someone with natural immunity to get the vaccine is not going to reduce their immunity, and might boost it (or might not). So with fairly little downside, it makes sense to vaccinate them surely?

They would face all the potential side-effects of the vaccine without much of an upside...

How does it make sense then for them to vaccinate?

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#543

Post by omegaworks »

dnissley wrote: post #530
ryandrake wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP's statement recognizes that incentives matter. If you remove the incentive to do the right thing, people will simply not do the right thing--If 2020 has taught us anything it has to be that! You can't just rely on everyone being a rational actor and let Nash Equilibrium keep society functioning. It becomes a gigantic Prisoners Dilemma with everyone choosing DEFECT. You complain that "not recognizing natural immuni…

The reason that it's lying is that natural immunity does provide decent protection. You're so focused on incentives in the small that you forgot about incentives in the large -- this type of bs is exactly why people feel entitled to opt into believing "alternative facts".

"Lying" implies malicious intent. It is not lying to communicate via the channels of public health the strategies that would optimize our utilization of public health resources.

As we are literally seeing in many states, obtaining natural immunity en-mass means that ICUs fill, doctors and nurses burn out, and morgues have waiting lists.

That "natural immunity provides decent protection" is itself a lie. Decent protection for whom exactly? It doesn't protect your community to act as a vector for this virus while you are obtaining said immunity. It doesn't even protect you from the risk of long-lasting post-infection disability. It is deliberately malicious and puts its believers at an objectively higher risk.

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#544

Post by nostrademons »

soperj wrote: post #537
ghiculescu wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hospitals didn’t overflow and society didn’t crumble for most of 2020 (when there was 0% vaccination), it’s odd to argue that it will now that there is 65% vaccination.

they did, and they are now. Society didn't crumble because of extreme monetary policy measures.

Arguably society is in the process of crumbling now. Jan 6th was part of that, as were the BLM protests, the anti-vax protests, the contentious school-board meetings, the constant tug-of-war between Federal/state/local/individual authorities, high inflation, supply shortages, people refusing to go back to work, etc.

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#545

Post by elihu »

bedhead wrote: post #322
isolli wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not wrong in itself, your comment epitomizes everything that has been wrong with our public health response. Trying to manipulate populations into a desired behavior by lying to them is, as you point out, counterproductive in the long run.

Amen. We have been so unbelievably myopic with COVID it truly hurts my head. Even today, ask someone who's COVID-obsessed, "What exactly is your longer-term plan here?" and watch as their mind breaks down. Too many people have completely stopped thinking about what they're trying to achieve and how they're going to do it. Half the country is just stuck, focused on short-term and no attention paid to anything else and…

Long term plan in my mind was to get enough people vaccinated that community spread stops being a thing. We were almost there in late spring prior to delta variant showing up, but now the situation has changed and the percentage of the population that has to be immune to stop the virus has gotten a lot higher.

So now the long term plan is for the holdouts to either change their minds and get vaccinated (and many of them have), or for natural herd immunity to take over when there aren't enough people who have neither been infected or vaccinated for the virus to spread to. It seems like the current wave has probably hit a peak. No idea what happens next. New infections could dwindle away to almost nothing, or we might have another big wave. At this point anyone in the U.S. who wants the vaccine can get it. It's sad that over a thousand people a day are still dying of this, but those are the risks that people have for some reason chosen to take.

If we continue to have waves of new infections, I don't know what the long term strategy is. We could drop all restrictions and "let nature run its course". A substantial portion of vaccinated people are probably going to be on board with that as long as we don't have a new variant that the vaccines are ineffective against. We could keep rigid restrictions on masking, social distancing, and large gatherings. That's really disruptive though to schools and churches and a lot of businesses, not to mention taking a long term toll on mental health.

I do wish those in wealthier countries like the U.S. were more invested in getting vaccines to everyone that wants it, anywhere in the world. New variants can come from anywhere.

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#546

Post by dnissley »

nsxwolf wrote: post #370
isolli wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not wrong in itself, your comment epitomizes everything that has been wrong with our public health response. Trying to manipulate populations into a desired behavior by lying to them is, as you point out, counterproductive in the long run.

I believe we'd see more people choose to be vaccinated if we'd: * Stop lying * Stop threatening * Stop mocking people when they die

We're so far down the lying/threatening/mocking road that it's going to take years, maybe decades, to recover that trust -- and that's if we stopped now.

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#547

Post by km3r »

scythe wrote: post #494
isolli wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that antibodies don’t tell the whole story. They may wane after a while, but the immune system is primed to fight off the virus at the next infection thanks to memory B cells and T cells. Unfortunately, T-cell tests are not available in Europe, and apparently not reliable in the US. Which confirms the original point: there seems to be little interest in detecting previous infections.

From an economic perspective, if the cost of the vaccine is less than the cost of the test, you just use the vaccine. "Natural immunity" makes sense as an objection if the individual had a recorded earlier infection, but administering 300M pre-infection tests and 200M vaccines is likely to be less efficient than just administering 300M vaccines. The more sophisticated of a test you demand, the stronger this argument…

I think Canada accepts positive covid tests as proof of prior infection, and many people already have those tests done and just sitting in their email.

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#548

Post by lame-robot-hoax »

timr wrote: post #439
lame-robot-hoax wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is comparing myocarditis to hospitalizations. Where is the comparison between myocarditis induced by vaccination vs natural infection? [0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v... “Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to dev…

This is out of date and incorrect. The latest data shows that the risk of myocarditis in children after two doses vastly exceeds the risk of myocarditis posed by the virus: https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1437876328640876544 Better breakdowns by age and gender show a risk of myocarditis after two doses as high as 1 in 3000: https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1437067899089219589 This number has been steadily…

Within that Twitter thread, there’s an interesting article on science based medicine that goes into this topic in detail.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-ant...

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#549

Post by summerlight »

djrogers wrote: post #393
summerlight wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, in many cases, "proof of vaccination" includes a cell phone photo of the piece of paper they handed out when you got a vaccine, so as it stands, lying is pretty easy. One critical difference is that there will be legal consequences if you're using a fake proof of vaccination.

That makes absolutely no sense, why would the same penalties not apply for lying about natural immunity?

Because we don't have a good legal definition of "natural immunity"? Compared to that, vaccination status is official record which is subject to forgery law and its effectiveness has been well studied against most COVID variants.

Note that it is pretty tricky to define natural immunity in a legal way since there is no good scientific consensus on the correlation between some proxy of natural immunity (e.g. antibody level) and its effectiveness against infection/transmission.

Re: Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

#550

Post by cdash »

ryandrake wrote: post #493
isolli wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not wrong in itself, your comment epitomizes everything that has been wrong with our public health response. Trying to manipulate populations into a desired behavior by lying to them is, as you point out, counterproductive in the long run.

OP's statement recognizes that incentives matter. If you remove the incentive to do the right thing, people will simply not do the right thing--If 2020 has taught us anything it has to be that! You can't just rely on everyone being a rational actor and let Nash Equilibrium keep society functioning. It becomes a gigantic Prisoners Dilemma with everyone choosing DEFECT. You complain that "not recognizing natural immuni…

> This isn't lying, it's results-driven communication.

Also known by another name, alternative facts.

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