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Why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US?

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

#691

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

Auracle wrote: post #260
danaris wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trying to work across party lines" went out the window when the Republicans decided that "prevent absolutely anything the Democrats want to do, no matter how objectively beneficial it would be or whether it was fully supported by Republicans in the past" was a viable and acceptable method of getting re-elected.

“If the public-health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it — absolutely," the California senator said during the first and only vice-presidential debate. "But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I'm not taking it." -Kamala Harris Let’s not act like both parties don’t do the exact same thing, eh?

The moderator's question was "If the Trump administration approves a vaccine, before or after the election, should Americans take it and would you take it?"

Harris's answer was the right one, and the same one I would have given. An unqualified "yes" would be saying you'd take a vaccine approved by the administration even if the medical community wasn't confident in it, and the phrasing of the question was designed to elicit that clarification.

And let's not pretend it's surprising that her qualification was even needed; We're talking about the same president who used the presidential soap box to urge people to try curing and preventing COVID using Hydroxychloroquine despite no such recommendation from health officials or the medical community at large.

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

#692

Post by jonnycomputer »

throwawayfear wrote: post #677
wrycoder wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It should count. But why test for it and why expect proof? If someone is concerned, get vaccinated if you don't have antibodies already. And wear a mask when cases go above N in your area. Problem solved. What use is there to build systems of control that will turn into more surveillance and eventual enslavement?

That's a little over the top.

Kids get vaccinated to go to schools. We aren't in chains.

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

#693

Post by chiefalchemist »

glangdale wrote: post #575
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…

Aside from DUI risk and passive smoking, most of these risks are specific to the person. I can't catch obesity from being in the same room as a obese person, and while public health costs go up from drinkers/smokers/heavy people, I haven't heard of ambulances being gridlocked outside a hospital due to a spike of lifestyle diseases.

> Aside from DUI risk and passive smoking, most of these risks are specific to the person. I can't catch obesity from being in the same room as...

That's not entirely accurate. Human behavior is effectively viral (per any of the Jonah Berger books among others). What we see becomes the norm, a behavioral norm.

Smoking has decreased because it has become "less fashionable." And so on. So while you might not catch obesity in the strict virus sense, if you're exposed enough, that exposure can and often does influence your behavior.

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

#694

Post by radley »

throwawayfear wrote: post #689
radley wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine there's a trial process that would have to go through, just as we had with vaccinations.

Why? There are already tests for antibodies. And we already know over 100 million Americans had covid already. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news... A new study published in the journal Nature estimates that 103 million Americans, or 31 percent of the U.S. population, had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by the end of 2020. And we know that those antibodies from past covid are excellent, I call…

> The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study...

And the CDC has a study saying the opposite:

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

So, maybe we need a few more studies before jumping to conclusions.

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

#695

Post by kcb »

frebord wrote: post #518
ziziyO wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely incorrect. Public health isn’t a personal choice.

So many people don't fully grasp the concept of liberty.

Great Grandad why did you fight in World War 2? "I didn't grasp the concept of personal liberty."

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

#697

Post by nomel »

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…

> So now the long term plan is for the holdouts to either change their minds and get vaccinated (and many of them have)

This makes the huge assumption that the variants stop. The Mu variant, which appears to be vaccine resistant, is here already: https://www.newsweek.com/mu-variant-which-may-vaccine-resist...

My question is, have we ever mass distributed a non-sterilizing vaccine before?

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

#698

Post by rpmisms »

jjeaff wrote: post #120
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 think the biggest issue is that a lot of people think they had covid previously but didn't get tested so they don't really know. I thought I had covid early in the pandemic. Took a serology test and found out that I had not had it. I suspect a lot of people that think they had it are the same.

This is a reasonable concern. My wife had it and got the test to prove it, I also had it and did not get tested, but considering that she was asymptomatic, and we continued all normal activities, as well as quarantining together, it would be silly to question if I had it.

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

#699

Post by rpmisms »

throwaway287391 wrote: post #186
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 got vaxxed as soon as I reasonably could and I never want to get COVID, but if that's true it really does seem insulting to require vaccination for people who can prove they already had COVID. It's like they did get vaccinated but picked a much more difficult/risky and much more effective way to do so -- if that were their intention (and they avoided spreading it once they got it), one could say it was a heroic cho…

I had it before the vaccine. It was an absolute joke of an illness, and I'd rather not be referred to as "heroic" for getting a sneeze and a poor sense of smell for a while.

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

#700

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

silent_cal wrote: post #574
DiabloD3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a personal choice if you do not come in contact with anyone else as best as you can. Else, you run the risk of being infected, not knowing it, passing it onto other people who "have made a personal choice", involuntary manslaughtering them (unless you're religious, then you've biblically murdered them); or, alternatively, you run the risk of ending up in the ICU, and now somebody who did get the vaccine now…

The vaccine doesn't keep you from catching and spreading the virus.

It can reduce or minimize the number of cases you spread while infected (i.e. you won't be infected for as long on average), though, and the positive impacts of this at scale are large. (Consider that case numbers grow exponentially, so even preventing e.g. 20% of transmissions in one month will have outsized effects weeks or months later.)
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