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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?

#951

As far as I can tell, natural immunity relates to the variant. If you had Alpha, and then you encounter Delta, your natural immunity may help you a little, but possibly not enough to prevent hospitalization, since Delta is 2.5x more likely to cause a serious hospitalization. So natural immunity counts, but maybe not against powerful variants. And we should be doing whatever we can to prevent people from becoming infe…

Not so - the recent Israeli data is mostly about people catching covid classic and being protected against delta. Natural seems to cope with variants better, probably because it exposed you to the whole virus, not just the spike protein.

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

#952

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You think not mocking people when they die will increase vaccination rates? I honestly don't really know, but I'm skeptical. Adding social pressure to vaccinate is useful I think tho. We will see what happens with these new mandates.

Is it ok to mock people who die from AIDS now?

(this is intended as sarcasm to point out the morality of mocking people who die from a preventable disease)

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

#953
post #947

Are these people asleep? The vaccines are demonstrably better at producing immunity against strains other than the one you were infected with, particularly against Delta for people who were infected with vanilla or Alpha.

That seems completely untrue from the recent Israeli data.

This is the data I've seen: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...

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

#954
post #858

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…

So many people are criticizing you for your comment about 'lying'. Realistically, the statements presented are so under-specified that is pretty difficult to determine what 'the lie' is. Which is the entire point. Let's take OP's statement: "natural immunity is probably just as good as vaccination, we'll accept that as equal for passport purposes". Presumably, the negation of that statement i.e. "natural immunity is…

There are a lot of people criticizing, and that's OK. The voting on this one was the biggest roller coaster I've ever seen here--at one point is was my highest-upvoted recent comment. Obviously hit a nerve both ways.

I'm not condoning lying. I am condoning public policy (including communication to support that policy) that has the end result of saving lives and getting us back to normal. I think a lot of people here are young and rationalists and full of idealism. They have this pure idea that every human being is uniformly spherical and acts 100% rationally, so given all the facts, self-interest will surely steer us into a rationalist utopia, but that's just not the case. Idealists don't account for people working against their own self-interest because of religious fervor. They don't recognize widespread and rapidly spreading ignorance. Rationalists can't explain "doing it for the lulz".

I don't have a lot of love for politicians, but I don't envy their job: They're elected to steer a ship with close to half of the passengers drilling as many holes in the hull as fast as they can. If you have to tell them that drills are dangerous and should be avoided, then that's what you have to do.

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

#955
post #536

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…

It's a resource vs demand at this point.

Socialized healthcare systems already deal with this. For example being obese or a smoker will put you at the bottom of the list for organ transplant.

Given how unvaccinated covid cases are filling up some ICUs, why shouldn't we prioritize ICU access against eligible unvaccinated people?

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

#957
post #536

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…

it's not clear that people who smoke, eat, and/or overeat actually consume more healthcare over a lifetime. most people incur the majority of their healthcare expenses as they slowly die over the last several years of their life. the last few years just come sooner for unhealthy people.

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

#958

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight people can't transmit their overweightness to me through a virus or bacterium that they breathe into the air. If they could, then yeah, we'd probably have some kind of legal mandate on it. Just like we have a bunch of restrictions on smoking now, because indeed, that's something that you push into the air. The general rule is that your rights stop wher…

Most obese parents have obese children.

Yes, due to genetics and habits passed on. That's not the same thing as an infectious disease.

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

#959
post #942
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a look and have a job figuring which bit you are looking at - I assume its from "Deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021 edition of this dataset"? Though that isn't really "March to August." Have you considered that at the start of the year few people would have died 21 days after vaccination because that had only just happened. 6 months later more would have died as they would have had 6 months to g…

Yes it starts in January but I mentioned March because it took some time for a large number of people to actually get the vaccine, and also there was probably flu going around in Jan/Feb. I should have said July not August.

The numbers reflect weekly, age standardised death rates. Therefore once you have a decent population size in each cohort, the timing shouldn’t matter. These are non-covid deaths so rates shouldn’t change except for normal seasonal patterns.

However it could be something like what JoshuaDavid mentions below - that healthy people are disproportionately being moved from the 21 days cohort to the second dose cohort by some selection mechanism.

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

#960
post #235
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah small note to add here: the last pediatric vaccine (garadasil / HPV) went through a decade of clinical trials before approval

The infection rate and how HPV spreads is completely different from an airborne virus. The time comparison to do trials isn't really meaningful.

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