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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?

#591

Post by peteradio »

sam0x17 wrote: post #348
peteradio wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my medical decisions will be made for me because its too hard to do a proper test? How much fucking money has been spent due to this pandemic, amazing vaccine development, government backstops all over the place, but somehow a routine blood draw and test is seen as too absurd an idea?

> So my medical decisions will be made for me because its too hard to do a proper test In short, yes, this is called good public health policy. It's not merely a simple blood test and it's not something just any lab could do. Anti-body testing is finicky, expensive, time-consuming, and not as reliable as has_vaccine (boolean). So in other words, we are going to make your medical decision for you because not doing so…

In fact the specificity of an antibody test is much better correlated with "has_immunity" than a vaccine card.

The situation is analogous to making someone wash their hands who has already washed their hands.

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

#592

Post by Tycho »

javagram wrote: post #580
Tycho wrote: post #459

Yesterday in England, they published statistics that showed (among other things) the rate of non-covid deaths among vaccinated people greatly increased from March to August. By a factor that dwarfs the improvement in covid-related deaths. For some reason they didn't feel it was necessary to comment on or explain this surprising pattern. I can think of a number of explanations, but it makes me wonder if they are reall…

There are lots of experts who regularly interpret this data. Your comment is pretty vague, so I looked at the excel sheet myself - I assume you’re referring to table 5, “Second dose”? The highest death rate in that table is 14.6 per 100k on 2-Jul-21. Meanwhile, looking at the unvaccinated population in that same table, the death rate per 100k starts out at 22 per 100k, goes as high as 66 per 100k in February, and the…

You didn’t notice what is happening in the “21 days after first dose” column? It went from 22 to 100!

And if the NHS and other experts noticed it, they for some didn’t include an explanation along with their other comments on the data.

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

#593

Post by pandaman »

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.

Doubleplusgoodful newspeak, comrade.

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

#594

Post by droidist2 »

elihu wrote: post #545
bedhead wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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

Was this your plan back in March 2020 or did it become your plan somewhere down the line? What I remember from March 2020 is that the plan was to "flatten the curve" with temporary restrictions. The possibility of a vaccine was theorized to be between 18 months away to possibly never.

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

#595

Post by Tycho »

javagram wrote: post #581
Tycho wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without looking extensively, it seems that it's usually between 1000 and 1500 per 100k per annum , so between 20 to 30 per week as a direct comparison. This seems steady over recent history. This compared to a rate for the vaccinated that went from 20 to 100 over spring and summer. The only thing that springs to mind is that maybe the treatment of with-covid/from-covid deaths became less significant through the year…

The “100” is specifically for the population of 21 days after first dose, i.e. those who didn’t get their second dose of vaccine. You can see the population who fall into the “21 days after” shrinks the whole time the “Second dose” population grows. Probably there’s something specific to those people who didn’t get or were unable to get the second dose of the vaccine that elevates their risk of mortality, like povert…

It would need to be a heck of a big effect to drive that sort of elevation in mortality.

I suppose conceivably there is a strong adverse selection/sorting effect happening, but I’m not sure that fits with the pattern. Need to think about it. (Note also the upward trend of the second-dosed.) I think it’s more likely an issue with the way the data is collected.

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

#596

Post by wrycoder »

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…

We can test for natural immunity. That then counts as fully vaccinated.

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

#597

Post by hstan4 »

kcb wrote: post #379
hstan4 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re totally ignoring the data from the study (that you probably didn’t even read) because it doesn’t fit your narrative. How beneficial.

What narrative, getting the vaccine is a narrative? Beneficial to who? I don't know how to read.

Your narrative is to, regardless of data that can justify (possibly improved) immunity through previous infection, “just get the vaccine”.

I agree if you haven’t had it previously you should get it, but that’s not what this study is examining.

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

#598

Post by wrl »

mactitan wrote: post #483
wrl wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article was published on 4th December, 2020. Have the concerns expressed therein borne out in the 10 month interim?

Yes it’s interesting that they are using previous corona profiles. You would think a yr is long enough but I’m patient and will hedge my bet by losing my job.

Previous corona profiles? The article was written before the vaccines were widely available, so the only people who had received them were in the clinical trials.

A year is absolutely long enough. To quote Derek Lowe in the "From the Pipeline" article:

"We have hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated to produce antibodies against the non-Delta coronavirus protein domains and are who are now being exposed to the Delta variant. To reiterate, there is (to the best of my knowledge) no evidence whatsoever of ADE in this situation. In fact, we see the opposite: people who have been vaccinated are far less likely to become infected with the Delta variant, and if they become infected, they are far less likely to experience severe disease. These trends have been seen over and over in different populations, and they are the exact opposite of what you would see if ADE were operating. If the mechanism proposed by Yahi et al. were happening in the real world, then we should see higher Delta infection rates among vaccinated people, with more severe disease. We are not. We are seeing the reverse. The vaccines simply to not appear to be causing ADE, no matter how many reasons one might be able to spin for them to do so."

Just get the vaccine.

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

#599

Post by wrycoder »

jowday wrote: post #189

The answer is pretty simple - the moment authorities start saying "well, natural immunity is probably just as good as vaccination, we'll accept that as equal to vaccination for passport purposes", a huge segment of the population who's on the fence about getting the vaccine might just opt to wait until they're infected naturally, or, even worse, get infected purposefully (EG, chicken pox parties). Which leads to more…

We can test whether someone has natural immunity.

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

#600

Post by glenda »

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…

Out of curiosity, what is your long term plan?

From my perspective people who aren’t concerned about contracting and spreading covid are the short term thinkers - they just want to have things back to how they used to be right now without any thought about mitigating the threat.

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