Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

bmj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 1001 posts

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

#641

Post by collegeburner »

iamnotwhoiam wrote: post #629
ixacto wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What about drinking and smoking? Literally Whataboutism. Don’t take the irrelevant bait.

No it's not. It's saying that we tolerate huge social costs elsewhere, so why is this one too large to bear?

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

#642

Post by landemva »

orwin wrote: post #70
zwieback wrote: post #17

I'm in favor of vaccine mandates but if there was a better way of quantifying immunity I'd be all in favor of letting people with natural immunity get a waiver. As everything with COVID, the lack of hard data and the poor communication of federal and state agencies has enabled politicians, con men and sectarians to exploit the confusion to their benefit.

There is, actually, antibody test. They are quite costly however. Im my country, getting infected count as the 1rst dose (yes, i know, natural immunity is better with "real" infections, but rememeber that Covid sometime start an auto-immune disease, it's hard to test for this, so its less costly to just vaccinate people (the jab cost 12E)). No scientific response. This is mostly pragmatic, and probably politic too. I…

I paid $20 or $25 in cash. No insurance accepted. And they did the finger prick blood test. For the time and materials, this seemed reasonable.

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

#643

Post by lmm »

glenda wrote: post #600
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…

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.

My long term plan is to accept that covid will be endemic and will kill a certain number of people each year, just as we already do with regular flu. (I'm all for more anti-death measures in the long term, but in QALY terms there are much higher priorities e.g. tougher licensing and stricter penalties for drivers who kill people). I believe that that's the inevitable endgame, and the only remaining question is how long we prolong the economic damage and human suffering of the restrictions out of some hair-shirt sense of virtue in doing so.

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

#644

Post by gowld »

sreque wrote: post #621
mattnewton wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If lots of people independently choose to take the risk and they're not harming anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to? There just isn't a way to ensure the "not harming anyone else" with a highly transmissible virus like this, even if we were to somehow convince hospitals to assume the legal and ethical risks of denying treatment to COVID patients when they have room to preserve hospital capacity, and even…

If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected. If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need. The reality is that covid isn't dangerous enough…

Not everyone can medically safely take the vaccine.

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

#645

Post by anonymoushn »

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…

It seems like a policy of forcing people with natural immunity to be vaccinated could have negative externalities if there are other countries in the world that don't have enough vaccines.

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

#646

Post by iamnotwhoiam »

collegeburner wrote: post #641
iamnotwhoiam wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about drinking and smoking? Literally Whataboutism. Don’t take the irrelevant bait.

No it's not. It's saying that we tolerate huge social costs elsewhere, so why is this one too large to bear?

There is no way to have a good faith argument with someone who is advocating not saving lives because we aren’t saving other lives.

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

#647

Post by lmm »

rootusrootus wrote: post #374
jowday wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could say that if authorities hadn't lied about, say, masks or this stuff with natural immunity, things would gone a lot better and people would have behaved much more rationally about COVID, but I don't think that's true. I've got family in a small town in the south - the countermeasures they took against COVID basically amounted to Wal-Mart closing for a weekend in March. Most of the people there had made…

> I wish I could say that if authorities hadn't lied about, say, masks or this stuff with natural immunity, things would gone a lot better and people would have behaved much more rationally about COVID, but I don't think that's true. I agree. For someone whose threshold of 'did the authorities lie about masks' is one cherry-picked example, there was never any hope. They were absolutely going to find someone to confir…

Nonsense. There's such a thing as people on the margin. On any binary issue most pieces of evidence "won't matter" to most people, in that that one piece of evidence is unlikely to be the one that "flips" the person, but that doesn't mean people are ignoring the evidence - it's just that most of the time any given piece of evidence is the difference between 99% believing and 98% believing rather than the difference between 50% believing and 49% believing.

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

#648

Post by jeromegv »

collegeburner wrote: post #641
iamnotwhoiam wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about drinking and smoking? Literally Whataboutism. Don’t take the irrelevant bait.

No it's not. It's saying that we tolerate huge social costs elsewhere, so why is this one too large to bear?

Well if you look at smoking, we did quite similar things. We let people smoke, it's not forbidden, but don't try to smoke within a restaurant, an indoor space, a flight, etc. Why? Because that's where your secondary smoke can start impacting other people. But smoke at home as much as you want!

Sounds familiar?

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

#649

Post by j16sdiz »

collegeburner wrote: post #641
iamnotwhoiam wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about drinking and smoking? Literally Whataboutism. Don’t take the irrelevant bait.

No it's not. It's saying that we tolerate huge social costs elsewhere, so why is this one too large to bear?

This is exactly what “whataboutism” is.

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

#650

Post by lmm »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #467
jowday wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could say that if authorities hadn't lied about, say, masks or this stuff with natural immunity, things would gone a lot better and people would have behaved much more rationally about COVID, but I don't think that's true. I've got family in a small town in the south - the countermeasures they took against COVID basically amounted to Wal-Mart closing for a weekend in March. Most of the people there had made…

> if authorities hadn't lied about, say, masks or this stuff When did authorities lie? The position on masks changed over time as data was acquired. Unless you mean when the FDA/CDC was worried about a run on masks, which they were right about. But I think ascribing a malicious intent to that learning process is disingenuous. The only people that have made literally malicious claims have been people on the far-right,…

> When did authorities lie? The position on masks changed over time as data was acquired. Unless you mean when the FDA/CDC was worried about a run on masks, which they were right about.

The fact that they say it was intended to prevent a run on masks proves that it was a lie and they knew it was a lie, which is inherently malicious in my book.

Post reply on HN