> Do you think it's a reasonable thing for most people to take your stance and not get vaccinated?

As with any other disease, it is reasonable (and expected) for everyone who had covid to not get vaccinated, given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine.

That this is even considered controversial by some people just goes to show you how far our science education has failed us.

> the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine.

My understanding is that the opposite is true, at least based on what we know right now. Here is an article summarizing just that[1], which links to a few peer-reviewed studies (and a couple that are pending review) suggesting that the vaccines are better than natural immunity.

I don't have any background in this or agenda or anything, so don't shoot the messenger - just sharing what I understand to be the opinion of at least some of the medical community.

> "Vaccines are highly efficacious," Fauci concluded. "They are better than the traditional response you get from natural infection."

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-why-covid-vaccines-wor...

The linked article doesn't support either view.

The link reports that vaccines have been observed to generate higher antibody-levels than natural infections. It was also observed that vaccines seem to protect against a set of variants. This is the good news that is worth reporting.

But there are observed occurences of the opposite; that vaccinated people test negative for antibodies. Similarly, people test negative for antibodies some time after recovering. Sometimes, recovered people never test positive for antibodies.

Diagnostic tools widely available are simply not good enough to test the immune response.

I would want something a bit more than studies by the vaccine maker about how good their vaccine is -- for example having those studies reproduced by a third party and comparing natural immunity to the vaccine -- before concluding that a vaccine can be better than natural immunity. It is almost always the case that natural immunity is superior to vaccines.

> It is almost always the case that natural immunity is superior to vaccines.

Do you have a source for that claim? GP offered peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary, which you don't believe, but so far you've offered no evidence at all.

> given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine

That sort of claim really requires evidence. "Obvious" statements aren't science.

I’m not an expert by any means, just trying to reason this out logically.

I don’t know too much about COVID, so I’ll use Flu as an example.

Let’s say your statement is true. You get antibodies for the specific strain of Flu that you caught and the response was greater than vaccine. Flu vaccines include multiple strains. So even if your premise was true, you should get the vaccine to protect against other strains right? Unless you are advocating for catching every strain of Flu?

>given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine

This is false. Stop spreading misinformation.

You don't have the authority to decide what is misinformation and what isn't.

If you disagree with it counter it with your own facts but you are not the speech police.

Who are the speech police and who has the authority?

Stop spreading misinformation. My comment was not false, and in fact is quite obvious. e.g. from https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdch/Waiver_Ed_Natural_Im...

"It is true that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines."

The only argument that document takes about it actually being better is that with some vaccines you need two shots instead of one. That's not compelling as being "better" at all. "Better" would imply that, once the complete course of vaccination is complete, the immunity is somehow more complete, stronger, or longer lasting.

Quite often what is "obvious" isn't true. Take some time and do some reading on this topic and you'll find that vaccines can provide equal or better immunity than a natural infection.

Your comment was indeed false, and many many studies have been done to compare natural vs vaccine immunity. Vaccination with a highly effective vaccine, e.g. Moderna or Phizer/BNT yield higher antibody response, and are more protective against variants in study after study.

"As with any other disease, it is reasonable (and expected) for everyone who had covid to not get vaccinated, given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine."

This is actively untrue.

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4813740/ vs. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29029053/ for a non-COVID example.

>We are at the tail end of this thing _because_ we have a vaccination available.

Are you implying naturally gained immunity does not play a role in herd immunity? Is there any data which supports this hypothesis?

Brazil. Sweden. Seasonal flu. HIV.

Human immunity is not the sole factor in herd immunity.

No he is not

The person you are responding to is not *most people". They had the virus and they recovered.

The vaccine is intended to create immunity in people who don't already have it because they haven't already caught the virus.

This really isn't complicated.

The vaccines are effective against the spike protein, which is what makes SARS-CoV-2 so virulent. In reality, there are many ways skin that cat, and there's no guarantee that the body chose the spike protein. From the article:

> most of these participants still had memory B cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2

No matter how you slice it, you are playing 'Rona Roulette if you don't get vaccinated.

The CDC also recommends getting vaccinated despite any prior infection, and there has been anecdotes of post-acute COVID-19 syndrome being alleviated with a vaccination.

The root comment is special pleading.

If the body cleared the virus, then what it chose is effective whether that’s the spike or the nucleocapsid.

It is actually more likely to be robust than vaccine induced immunity.

The claims about superiority of vaccine induced immunity that I’ve seen all rely on antibody counts, and in the very short term that may very well be true - but the importance of T-cells is not sufficiently well characterized to say it with certainty.

... which hinges completely on the virus not evolving at all, which is outside of the realm of reality.

Evolving a new spike is extremely disadvantageous for the virus.

Widespread natural immunity is not enough to prevent a repeat of this this or next year, especially when we have evolutionary hotbeds in countries which could not (or would not) do anything to prevent the spread.

> Evolving a new spike is extremely disadvantageous for the virus.

... Right up until almost everyone has an immune response to the spike and not to any other feature, at which point a virus which changes the spike and potentially keeps its other features is a winner. We are creating an immune monoculture.

> ... which hinges completely on the virus not evolving at all, which is outside of the realm of reality.

This makes no sense.

If you only only target the spike, you assume the spike doesn't change sufficiently. If you target the entire virus, you assume the entire virus doesn't change sufficiently. As far as I know, mutations are generally assumed to be random. You're effectively matching against a shorter string (spike only), so you're less likely to recognize a mutated virus, than if you match against a longer string (the entire virus) which is what natural immunity targets.

Mutations in the spike (that still keep it effective - and we actually have quite a few of these already) are much more likely to evade the vaccine-induced immunity than they are likely to evade natural immunity.

Mutations only in the nucleocapsid are more likely to evade natural immunity than vaccine-induced immunity, but to a lesser degree - because natural immunity also targets the spike.

> If the body cleared the virus, then what it chose is effective whether that’s the spike or the nucleocapsid. It is actually more likely to be robust than vaccine induced immunity.

Where’s the research showing there is more effective immunity possible than the spike protein method of the vaccine?

This comment avoids the facts noted in the linked article, which seem to point to perpetual immunity of anyone who was infected by SARS-CoV-2 in the past.

There are multiple documented cases where a person caught COVID twice (where the two instances were genetically different, and therefore not a false positive caused by lingering dead virus).

The linked article only indicates that antibody production should continue for a long time, but that's only one factor in robust long-term immunity. The rate of antibody production and the set of proteins that the antibodies target are also very important.

It's good news to be sure, but it doesn't yet prove what you seem to want it to.

>There are multiple documented cases where a person caught COVID twice

There have been far more breakthrough cases of fully vaccinated people than there have been confirmed reinfections.

> There have been far more breakthrough cases of fully vaccinated people than there have been confirmed reinfections.

Yeah, but there are vastly more vaccinated people than people have been confirmed infected even once, so that doesn’t really tell you anything. (Currently, the number of vaccination doses being delivered per day globally is about 1/5 the total number of confirmed global COVID cases.)

Thats a good point.

We'd need to compare the number of confirmed reinfections divided by confirmed infections with the number of breakthrough cases divided by the number of fully vaccinated people.

Its also worth noting the confirmed reinfection count is on a much longer time scale than breakthrough infections. So we currently have more data about the long term natural immunity than we do for vaccinated immunity.

Of those cases, I’ve seen zero reported as symptomatic. If you have any proof otherwise please link sources.

I don't see the relevance of whether the re-infection cases are symptomatic. If anything, this makes it slightly more important to be careful, because asymptomatic transmission is what makes this virus worse than others of similar lethality. I don't think that's a significant factor, though.

You must have read a different article than I did. It just talked about the production of antibodies. They help fight off infection but don't necessarily make you immune. The article also specifically mentions vulnerability to variants.

Isn't that how vaccines works?

My understanding is the antibodies created from the vaccine are not the same antibodies that maybe created from having one of the main strains of the virus and thus would not offer the same level of protection.

> “They help fight off infection…”

Yeah, that’s what the immune system does.

Providing partial immunity, not necessarily full immunity.

It's strange how the same people who scream "TRUST THE SCIENCE" the loudest seem to ignore your body naturally producing antibodies to Covid after you've been infected and recovered.

You simply don't need a vaccine to help your body produce antibodies if you already have them. Not just for covid 19 but for anything.

Don't let anyone shame you or pressure you into getting a vaccine that you're not comfortable getting.

>It's strange how the same people who scream "TRUST THE SCIENCE" the loudest seem to ignore your body naturally producing antibodies to Covid after you've been infected and recovered.

It's not strange at all. Human beings have probably been doing this since not too long after languages developed:

Do 'X' because 'Y', since 'Y' is in agreement with my opinion and personal interests of you doing 'X'.

'Y' may be science, religion, math, emotion, whatever. The point is that many people will push information they want pushed with and later contradict themselves if need be as long as they can consistently push the information they want. The arguments and rationale are usually secondary, not the primary driver.

Politicians do this a lot. It's lying in the form of intellectual dishonesty or sheer ignorance. Many highly religious people push firm accordance with their religion or their interpretation of their religion, while allowing their own desires to shape those ground rules: they pick and choose which rules to follow literally and which to interpret, and so on.

There are a lot of people out peddling things in the name of science but they don't understand science: evidence, process, uncertainty, etc. When it comes to COVID we've learned a lot but there's still a lot of uncertainty around a lot of aspects in various studies and we need to understand that with humility and act accordingly.

What's your area of expertise regarding antibodies?

I'm quite happy admitting that I do not know anything other than the basics and trust in experts in their respective fields instead.

I don't trust anyone without running a skeptical eye over their claims. Blind faith in authority is authoritarianism manifest.

It's literally in OP's linked article. Did you come here to comment without even clicking the link?

Vaccinate the high risk people then.

This doesn't work because non-vaccinated people will breed variants, which the original vaccine won't work on.

Can you provide some evidence that this happened now, or for earlier diseases?

Manaus in Brazil doesn't count, FTR. It never ever reached herd immunity: the data was a large overestimation.

I think my evidence is that there are variants. Isn't the way variants work:

- A human gets infected

- The human becomes a virus factory

- While producing gazillions of viruses, mutations occur

- Mutations are variants

The most prolific by far variant factories are apparently immunocompromised individuals, including those vaccinated - which harbor infection for months and a weak immune system - which lets the virus optimize against weak humans, in the same way the traditional vaccines lets the immune system optimize against a weak virus.

(From memory, don’t have a link handy)

Yeah I mean, we're (presumably) both doing some armchair virology, but I buy that if you're immunocompromised that you can't fight off the virus, and thus the virus succeeds in turning you into a virus factory until you die.

That said, I don't think that's an argument against non-immunocompromised people getting vaccinated. It's like me saying "don't touch the toaster if it were just on, you'll get burned" and you responding "yeah but ovens really burn you." OK well, be careful around both I guess.

It is a great argument that non-immunocompromised people should get vaccinated. If non-immunocompromised people are vaccinated, the probability that immunocompromised people get infected gets smaller, thus causing less variants.

Sounds like boosters are needed regardless. High risk people get boosters, problem solved.

Sure but in the interim, high risk people die. Your argument is essentially "I would rather not get a vaccine, even in the face of some high risk people dying". My argument is "I would rather everyone (within reason) get a vaccine, even in the face of some people not liking it".

That is clearly not logically consistent. I also know that the following will be very bothersome to hear for many people and I hope to . Nothing would indicate that unvaccinated would lead to mutations, especially over vaccinated whose vaccination does not actually perform as well as natural immunity developed from the body naturally building immunity.

What is actually bing discussed in the non-corporate medical community and research is starting to validate the very well understood theory that relatively poorly performing vaccines are actually going to lead to mutations if they haven't already. It is the same concept that has led to "antibiotic resistant bacteria" when antibiotics are either overused or not used as long as they should be, leaving the most resistant bacteria to reproduce.

I realize it must be difficult to accept such a contradiction to what people are told by the corporate media and corporate medical industrial complex. It also requires accepting and acknowledging that may have been injected with an untested/risky novel experimental medial compound for no good reason, but that it will likely also lead to even worse variants that will require ever more vaccines that are ever less tested and will increase risks of adverse reactions with every single event.

No matter what, we have clearly cast the die and things have clearly been fundamentally shifted in ways that are clearly carry unknown outcomes. THAT should really worry people, even if we all survive this particular event, scathing by relatively unharmed. What happens when the next virus comes around that may actually be as dangerous as we were scared about and some or maybe all of the next rushed vaccines trigger antibody-dependent enhancement or some other mortal effect that kills millions with no way to prevent it.

We ARE playing with fire here. No matter how we look at it. Someone, possibly many, will be get burned at some point probably far sooner than one would think.

I am away from my home in the state of Nebraska now because my mother-in-law was one of the small number of people to experience a highly adverse event from her second Pfizer shot.

She went into cardiac arrest 3 hours after getting her shot. It's been over a week now and they will be taking her off life support shortly because she is now brain dead. It should be noted that this is a rare event and I do recommend to my loved ones especially my father and her to get vaccinated.

That being said no media organizations are going to report what happened to my mother-in-law. They know if they do so it will create vaccine hesitancy in many people. I understand and empathize with this but it does raise ethical questions.

The corporate media are perfectly happy to stay silent on this because they no longer view their role as informing the public, but rather as getting the public to do what they think is right.

They are happy to report on statistically improbable events as long as they are part of their overall political narrative. For every person that reflexively responds to me that what happened to my mother-in-law is a rare event, the same people won't hesitate to talk about the George Floyd murder as if it's a typical occurrence in police interactions with black men. The data shows this to be not true at all but they don't care because their narrative is all they care about.

My point is that this vaccine technology is definitely new and it's probably going to be revolutionary and saving tremendous numbers of lives especially in Africa with malaria. However because it's so new there are going to be bad things happening from it as well and folks who deny this are making problems worse.

What happened to my mother-in-law is now being used as fuel by various people my family who are Alex Jones followers. The reaction from the medical establishment and the complete lack of coverage in the media has further added ammunition to this idiot in my family. Suppressing information always creates a backlash every time.

That sounds awful and you have my condolences.

With respect to the media: > That being said no media organizations are going to report what happened to my mother-in-law. They know if they do so it will create vaccine hesitancy in many people. I understand and empathize with this but it does raise ethical questions.

There are plenty of news organizations who would publicize this story. There have been major outlets reporting on all manner of vaccine complications as they have been rolled out.[1][2][3]

I would encourage you to reach out to the CDC directly if you feel the medical team is not taking it seriously.

[1]: https://www.foxnews.com/health/cdc-guidance-heart-inflammati... [2]: https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2021/05/04/cdc-investigating-mi... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/health/covid-vaccine-deat...

Thank you.

The medical team did confirm with us yesterday that they have reported it to VAERS.

The irony with all of this is rich. The entire point of the vaccine was to prevent her from acquiring an infection that would potentially put her on a ventilator in an ICU forcing us to say goodbye to her as she suffocated.

We are now going to be turning off the ventilator, removing the tube, and saying goodbye to her as she suffocates. At least she is brain dead which she would not be if she was dying of covid-19. That's the only blessing we can think of.

Is this written up anywhere public, preprint, VAERS, etc?

When I was visiting her yesterday afternoon, the attending physician confirmed with us that her case had been reported to the VAERS system.

> Nothing would indicate that unvaccinated would lead to mutations

It's actually how viruses work [1].

[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-does-it-mean-that-th...

Many high risk ppl cant get vaccinated, because they are, well, high risk.

Some people cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

The thing that I find so wrong about this type of argument is that the vaccine is not proven to prevent spreading the virus. It is only proven to stop the onset of COVID-19 after one contracts the virus.

So the line of reasoning that argues one should get vaccinated to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is not valid.

Edit: Wow - the downvotes... There is some evidence that transmission is reduced, but it is not proven:

"the risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in fully vaccinated people cannot be completely eliminated"

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

I suspect people have a question in their minds for months ("Will the upcoming vaccines prevent a vaccinated person from carrying and spreading the virus?"), and whatever is the first credible reply to that question, they cement it in their understanding ("you may still spread covid if you're vaccinated").

Now we have far more real world data and it appears that even if a vaccinated person is carrying an asymptomatic infection that they shed very little virus. This is not a certainty, but things are leaning that way.

But people can't replace the old "fact" they knew with the new "fact".

Not proven, but looking increasingly likely. From your own link to the CDC, "A growing body of evidence indicates that people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) are less likely to have asymptomatic infection or to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others."

I'm not sure why people keep saying this. The original studies did not study if the vaccine prevents spread, that is true. I'm not certain myself, but I believe that studies done based on COVID spread in countries where vaccination rates are high (at least Israel) point to the direction that it prevents spread as well. Are these not valid data points?

There was also the Seychelles data point which had the highest vaccinated rate and then had a large outbreak after.

The outbreak was mostly in unvaccinated people, and there was no background of prior infections (they never had a first wave).

Besides, studies on healthcare workers, who are tested regularly, showed a clear reduction in transmission.

Which vaccine did they use? The CDC says the strongest evidence for preventing spread is for the mRNA vaccines.

The vaccine produced by China's Sinopharm company:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sinopharm+seychelles&t=fpas&ia=web

Not entirely accurate. From the top article in your search:

"Among the vaccinated population that has had two doses, 57 percent was given Sinopharm, while 43 percent was given AstraZeneca."

I thought I read that it was proven to significantly reduce the likelihood of infection as well as completely eliminate the risk of hospitalization if you do get infected. Admittedly, the media coverage was abysmal (everyone was just quoting “90% effective” without clarifying “effective at what?”).