Given the vaccine is not approved for people under 12, there's no way it could be 90%, as 28% of their population is 0-14 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Age_str...
Maybe in some US states where the disease was horribly mismanaged that number is much higher, but it's a) not reliably counted b) badly researched. Knowing whether someone is "naturally immune" is a big roll of the dice, whereas we know for sure when someone is vaccinated.
And to get to a high "natural" immunity rate requires unnecessary death and suffering.
But yes, half of the 18-29 year olds here seem to be rolling the dice and playing this "natural immunity" game; which is why they are now the vast majority of hospital admissions for this disease.
The state of COVID is such that if you are an adult you can get vaccinated and you are safe enough, no matter what decisions others make. If you are not an adult then the risks to you are so low that you are safe anyways. The 2009 swine flu killed 3 times as many children in 9 months as COVID has killed in 18 months: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2009/12/cdc-shar....
Yet This flu did not require masking, lockdowns, forced vaccinations, or any shutting down of schools.
If you are immunocompromised, or otherwise vulnerable even with the vaccine, then it is up to you to take extra precautions, like wearing an N95 in public or avoiding crowded areas.
COVID simply isn't deadly enough to warrant the curbing of freedom that is being done or the vilification of those not making choices we think they should. Get vaccinated if you want to and move on with your life. Stop forcing people to get vaccinated, especially those who've already been infected. And finally, get the government out of the business of mandates of any kind. They aren't needed. People have the tools already to protect themselves how they see fit.
Your second paragraph is eliding a lousy "therefore" - obviously, the cost of shooting for natural immunity versus vaccination is that you have to experience the actual disease and all its risks. Survivorship bias.
They have made definitive statements that are wrong too many times in the past year and a half. That is a massive failure. The average joe has nowhere near the time nor expertise required to interpret the scientific data out there, so trust is everything for them. At some point, you run out of the good will required to say "ok, I'll trust you again". Maintaining trust is a leader's most important job.
Two facts that are trending toward consensus in the scientific literature:
A) Naturally infected individuals who recover will acquire robust and durable immunity [1][2]
B) Natural infection induces an immune response that is mostly similar but slightly different than the immune response induced by vaccination. The primary differences can be summarized as: naturally infected individuals have nucleocapsid protein antibodies whereas vaccinated individuals do not, and vaccinated individuals have an immune response highly targeted toward the spike protein RBD. [3][4][5]
In summary many people hypothesize that natural infection is better because it induces a broader and more balance antibody response, but the literature has not established consensus that this is necessarily "better" in terms of health outcomes for individuals.
[1] SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf
[2] Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
[3] Rapid induction of antigen-specific CD4+ T cells is associated with coordinated humoral and cellular immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination https://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613(21)00308-3
[4] Distinct SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Responses Elicited by Natural Infection and mRNA Vaccination https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.15.440089v4
[5] Antibodies elicited by mRNA-1273 vaccination bind more broadly to the receptor binding domain than do those from SARS-CoV-2 infection https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103407/
Great summary - I have seen no evidence that natural immunity is better. The opposite could be true. A nucelocapsid-specific immune response cannot be used to kill live virus (the nucleocapsid is not accessible for binding on the surface of a live virus). This means natural immunity will result in an intense off-target immune response (in addition to an intense on-target one for the spike). That off-target response elevates the chances of collateral tissue damage (cytokine storm).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33948610/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33907755/
Meanwhile the CDC published this study showing the opposite:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
I can understand why people are confused.
There appears to be two camps, one that believes that science can defeat this disease, and in the other camp people that believe we need to learn to adjust to our new reality.
I don't understand how a man made vaccine can provide better protection to the virus better than my body after recovering, but I'm not specialist.
Aren't the pharmaceutical companies financially incentivized to provide minimal protection, and annual booster shots? Why would they make something better?
As long as fear navigates our course, we won't see an end to this.
The Israel data is clearly showing natural immunity doing better for COVID, and every other peer-reviewed study I have seen shows natural immunity doing "at least" as well as vaccinated immunity.
Vaccines are part of our adjustment. There's one camp which tries to adjust, and another which places hands in their ears.
>I don't understand how a man made vaccine can provide better protection to the virus better than my body after recovering, but I'm not specialist.
The same way an antibiotic could cure certain diseases much better than your own body. Besides, you're much more likely to survive the vaccine than the disease.
>Aren't the pharmaceutical companies financially incentivized to provide minimal protection, and annual booster shots? Why would they make something better?
Efficiency isn't something pharmaceutical companies could just decide in advance. If they try to make something inefficient, there's a good chance it won't be effective at all, and they'll lose all the money invested in R&D.
And ultimately, less effective vaccines will be crowded out of the market, we already see this in some countries with AZ and J&J.
The herd immunity figure (1) legitimately changed with the variants, and (2) is always going to be a shot in the dark so personally I don't find much point in paying attention to government figures anyway. Government is providing figures to achieve an outcome; it's fundamentally a policy tool. If you want the science, listen to scientists.
The delta variant is currently overwhelming a large number of hospitals, and it wouldn't have done so with higher vaccination rates. Whether or not you view that statement as vilifying unvaccinated people is beside the point.
If it is going to become endemic, and there are very good arguments that it will, then I agree that we'll need to move on. But "moving on" != "ignoring". Flushing the existing vaccines down the toilet and letting the cards fall as they may is not a winning strategy, yet that's exactly what 40% of the US population is presently choosing.
"Moving on" means treating it like chickenpox or at least the flu. Not like meteor strikes.
That is the rhetoric that Fauci and others have been pushing, but the scientific literature is accumulating mounting evidence that counters the claim. Not to mention the data out of Israel - which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world - is also strong evidence against your claim. Israel is struggling with overwhelmed hospitals due to variants reducing the efficacy of vaccination and also naturally acquired immunity.
FWIW I'm keeping an open mind, please cite primary sources to support your claim and I will happily consider them.
As to the delta variant overwhelming hospitals, that's partially because hospitals are firing nurses that won't get vaccinated. The lack of beds is primarily a staffing problem and hospitals are shooting themselves in the foot. I've also heard they have been underpaying nurses and some are just quitting or switching to better-paying contract work.
Second, the media and even some hospital administration officials are blatantly deceiving people on actual hospital status: https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/08/06/fact-checking-4-claim...
There's a whole section there debunking the claims, for instance, that hospitals in Florida are overwhelmed.
I don't think anyone thinks that "moving on" means forgetting, but I do think it does entail having the government get out of the business of mandating lockdowns, masks, or vaccines. The problem lies in the fact that the media were too successful in scaring people to death about COVID. It makes handling the virus in a sane way impossible without negative political fallout.
If you'd like to confirm, dig up some medical staff on Twitter. "MedTwitter" is a thing. (But don't search based on keywords like "vaccine", because you will find what you seek. It'll be massively biased in a pro-vaccine direction. Find the medical professionals first, then see what they're saying.)
I think the question of whether to allow unvaccinated staff is a tricky one. I don't think it should be decided because some people are pissed off at vaccine resisters, and I haven't seen any strong evidence that it is. (I haven't looked, either.) Unvaccinated staff put their patients and coworkers at risk if they work, or if they don't work. Someone has to do the math.
Similarly for government intervention. It really bothers me when the government mandates anything. But I think of it like this:
Let's say I'm in a community that is fond of keeping tigers as pets. 5% of the population dies every year from wild tiger attacks. Many community members insist on letting their tigers be off-leash, calling it a fundamental part of their identity as tiger owners. Off-leash tigers kill 50% of the (remaining) human population each year.
I don't like leashing my tiger. But over half the people I know are dead. I would gather the community together and say, sorry guys, but we're going to have to agree to keep our kitties on leashes, no matter how friendly we think they are. And we're going to have to back up that agreement with expulsion, imprisonment, or taking tigers away. It sucks, but the risk is too high.
55% annual death rate is insanely high, but it makes the point that there is a number at which community (aka government) mandates are the right thing to do. We can argue at where the number ought to be, but not whether or not there is a number.
Right now, there are a lot of people dying, and a lot of "dry wood" that the virus is burning through. I think it's time to wet some of that fuel, whether it wants to get wet or not. (And even though we know some of that wet wood is still gonna burn.)
At this point we have the tools we need to be safe against COVID. Any adult that wants to get can vaccinated. Kids are under such low risk that they don't need to be vaccinated. The 2009 H1N1 flu killed 3 times as many children as COVID so far, and in half the time! Yet we didn't lock down, shut down schools, or torture our little children with masks during that pandemic. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2009/12/making-s...
If you're immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable even with the vaccine, then it is up to you to take extra precautions because COVID will be around forever.
COVID is not the equivalent of a population of tigers running rampant through our community. It's time for the fearmongering to stop and for us to get back to normal. And hospitals may need to adapt. Even during the height of the delta surge, data I've seen suggests that 80% or more of ICU beds are filled by non-COVID patients. Our hospitals are so designed for efficiency and cost reduction that we are incapable of handling surges of any kind, including ones that increase our ICU utilization by at most 25%. I see that more as a failure of our hospital systems than anything else.
In reality, unvaccinated with natural immunity are likely more protected against the virus than the vaccinated. Israel's vaccination rates are among the highest in the world, and they've suffered the same delta outbreak as everyone else. Further, Israel has the most accurate and comprehensive data to date, and their numbers clearly show the naturally-immunized outperforming the vaccinated during their delta wave. They've since resorted to giving 3rd booster shots to the most vulnerable to compensate.
https://arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israels-delta-outbreak-p...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/israel-delivers-boos...
The real issue is that COVID is likely going to become endemic, and at some point the world needs to face this and move on. Unfortunately, our politicians have been lying to us and using COVID as a tool to gain political power for so long, that they are unwilling to admit they were wrong and to steer us in the right direction. The best we can do is elect these people out.