I have only anecdotal evidence. My brother got Covid and after he recovered he would black out from walking briskly up a single flight of stairs from sudden lack of oxygen (O2 meter on his finger showed this as well). He was otherwise fine and could breathe easily, it just didn't oxygenate his blood well. He got the vaccine and that symptom just disappeared.

Now this is interesting — we need to run a study of “long Covid” symptoms after vaccination.

Personally, I fared ok - so I’ve got to consider the cost benefit (cost in terms of disrupting my current state)

The vaccine keys your immune system on a mostly unchanging part of the virus. It’s such a key part of the virus that for the virus to mutate that part it would be a dramatically different and less deadly mutation.

In an infection your body randomly keys on any of a large number of characteristics of the virus. Those almost certainly will be less lasting than the vaccine.

That’s why to get the vaccine.

So I guess my hesitation is, if my body has already been keyed by the original virus, had a terrible viral load (was positive for longer than I ever imagined), but very few symptoms... I’m fairly proud of my immune response and personally am wondering why I should take aim with a direct mRNA shot, feels unnecessary.

Here’s a discussion with how it all works and relevant links (edit: though I wish there were more sources there. Reader will have to do some work themselves): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27125871

There’s some positing that the vaccine could help or totally stop so-called long covid symptoms. My mom had some long covid symptoms and hasn’t since she got the vaccine.

Also from the link, second exposures to infectious diseases seriously boost the immune systems ability to fight the disease.

It’s like training your immune system once with the exposure and original infection then a second (and third time for Moderna and pfizer) time with the vaccines. In the mRNA vaccine case, they train on a particularly optimal characteristic.

My guess is the vaccine is acting as a placebo for those with long term symptoms. I'm sure eventually we will know more.

Or the long term symptoms are mostly nocebos, and/or the only reason they are regarded as having one cause instead of many (as well as symptoms they would have gotten anyway) is that the person in question knows about "long COVID", or a combination of those and possibly even something that's really causally related.

This needs empirical evidence though. It’s a just-so story without that. Not that I disagree with the prior.

There are conflicting stories, but I've heard a few different arguments (I'm not sure how accurate any of them are, though):

  * The vaccine is stronger than a low-viral-dose infection; you wind up with more antibodies and more T/B cell engagement, so theoretically more robust immunity
  * The vaccines might be better or worse than natural infection against the variants; on the one hand your body fought a whole wild virus and so the antibodies aren't restricted to the spike protein, like in the mRNA case, so your body might be less overfit. On the other hand, the vaccines seems to producer a stronger immune response, as stated above, so that might be better if the antibodies still mostly line up?

Honestly, even if I had Covid before, it seems to make sense to get vaccinated anyhow. It's free (man, why aren't all vaccines free?), Your employer is very unlikely to give you a hard time for getting it, or taking some time off for recovering from the common side effects of the second dose - it feels like the potential benefits (stronger immunity) outweigh the very limited risks (basically limited flu symptoms and a possible bruise at the injection site).

As a weird side note, at least among my cohort, the side effects seem to be a really clear marker of who's immune system recognizes the disease. My friends who didn't catch it all reported no problems the first time and symptoms on the second shot. My friends who tested positive reported symptoms from the first shot. I had to start immunosuppression after the first shot, but before the second (TNF Alpha Inhibitor), and the symptoms at the second shot were actually a relief that my immune system hadn't been tamped down too hard...

> I had to start immunosuppression after the first shot, but before the second (TNF Alpha Inhibitor), and the symptoms at the second shot were actually a relief that my immune system hadn't been tamped down too hard...

That gives me great pause. My personal preference is to avoid such experiences.

And same goes for my friends, first shot knocks out the positive cases.

There was a paper here a few weeks ago suggesting that those who had Covid and the vaccine had the highest rates of immunity against the variants. The antibodies you generate to a natural infection will be different from those generated by the vaccine, and a diverse set of antibodies seems to be the best bet against random mutation of the virus.

Some studies have shown immunity from infection may only last several weeks in some individuals, whereas vaccination has been shown to last much longer and more reliably.

This is misleading, it conflates the presence of antibodies with immunity. There is no reason to believe immunity is not durable; a strong immune response to related coronaviruses (e.g. SARS-CoV-1) lasts decades. Antibodies are only generated in response to infections, and disappear after the infection has passed at varying rates based on a number of factors.

People have no antibodies circulating for most things they are immune to. It is expensive to produce antibodies unnecessarily.

this is completely unfounded comment

there are varous studies showing most of the infected people have immunity at least for 7-8 months, while we don't have any studies about how long last immunity after vaccination, for what's worth it can last less than immunity from infection

yet people are shouting vaccine good, get it, get immunity and completely ignore the fact we should measure antibodies of vaccinated people while same people will shout oh if you were infected you are immune only for short time, I mean if you work for pharma lobby I can understand it, but are people really that trusting to pharma lobby, I remember also talking with doctors long before COVID how long last vaccination effect, they will tell you easily twice as long time as pharma company selling the vaccines, the reasons are obvious

Study from Italy - only 3 out of 162 symptomatic infected didn't have antibodies after 8 months https://www.thelocal.it/20210511/covid-antibodies-last-8-mon...

Study from England - antibodies persist for minimum 7 months https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/04/previous...