> [FDA] blocked Americans from finding out the status of their antibody immunity to SARS-CoV-2 ... prevents un-immune Americans from knowing that they are vulnerable ... exposes already immune Americans to the risk of an unnecessary or marginally beneficial vaccination ... prevents vaccinated Americans in whom the vaccine has not induced good immunity from knowing that they remain vulnerable ... discourages a vast majority of American physicians from providing the people with the necessary prescriptions to obtain COVID-19 antibody blood tests ... Every American deserves easy access to information about their personal immunity status in order to make a cogent decision to maximally protect themselves. Am I immune? Did my vaccine work for me? Am I still immune?
If one is donating blood etc, this information is available such as in the Red Cross donor app.
The push by the pro-vaccine groups in the US without accounting for folks who have antibodies acquired naturally - reeks of ignorance from those who are supposedly 'of science'
Yet from a science perspective they have a point, already having the disease matters.
Getting the Vaccine is easy. What is hard is to trust the what every biased, safety studies done on it and the fact the AEFI reporting system is not strictly mandated, indicating a bias from the authorities to not want to know about potential vaccine injuries.
As usual, this comment will get flagged. If you see this comment check back a bit later to see the shilling on HN.
There is nothing to hide if there is no data collected in the first place. Here in this video, you can see that even injuries sustained by people who took part in the trials are being rejected by the doctors citing as caused by "anxiety".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxqC9SiRh8
I think people are completely oblivious to this issue, and is under this fallacy that if there was something wrong with the vaccines, then the information will automatically appear in public perception. If you think this, you need to only look at how smoking went on for a long time without the people noticing any problem with it.
With vaccines, we know that the signal is killed right at the point of generation, because the medical practicioners are conditioned (being charitable here) to reject any injury as not being caused by the Vaccines.
AstraZeneca has not been approved in the US because of potential blood clot risks.
Nearly 2 billion people have been vaccinated against COVID-19, including >150 million people in the US, and hundreds of millions in the EU. There are very few adverse reactions, and no deaths. The risks of COVID-19 injury and death are far higher.
The lack of guidance for those who were previously infected was strange. When I'd read about immunization rates and progress towards "herd immunity", previous infections also weren't included in these stats, which again was strange.
I'm in Europe now, and here it seems like natural immunity is essentially as valid as vaccination, at least for travel.
I can't explain why previous infections seem so widely discounted in the US. It feels like an intentional omission, which makes it hard for me to trust at face value what I hear and read about the pandemic.
Here's the rub: is previous infection as good as Moderna? Probably not, especially given the new variants. (Though last year studies were showing infection providing 90%+ immunity.) But nothing is as good as Moderna. (Except maybe Novavax?) Should we require J&J vaccine recipients to be re-vaccinated with Moderna? Nobody is demanding that, though very roughly speaking J&J-level immunity may be about where things stand now for the previously infected.
This seems to be another unforced err by the CDC. Not as bad as some others, but unforced and very politically costly. It also complicates things going forward because it seems we're quickly approaching the point where we'll need to begin requiring a 2nd round of vaccinations. The CDC will need every last shred of credibility and good will left for that initiative. It could have been in a position where it could say, "hey, we tolerated the previously infected skipping vaccination before, but now the situation has changed." Instead, they'll have much less capital to work with.
I was trying to be conservative. I don't have any hard opinion on this one way or another. It seems like a degree of precision we'd be lucky to achieve in the best of times--i.e. when the virus and demographics aren't constantly evolving. And it's a degree of precision that is unnecessary to establish in this particular debate, even if we could. It feels like bike shedding.
The question isn't which is better--infection or vaccination. The question is, do we demand that the infected be vaccinated even though the substantial and consistent weight of scientific evidence gives us little reason to believe the previously infected put the population at more risk than the vaccinated, especially relative to vaccines that we affirmatively accept as sufficiently efficacious? The only scientifically justified answer is an unqualified, "No".
There are innumerable other questions people can debate, but from a pandemic policy perspective there's no need to venture there. And, frankly, it seems imprudent considering the level of uncertainty surrounding everything--not just the quality and relevance of data, but even if you're technically correct one moment, things can go sideways the next moment, necessitating a change in policy.
The CDC study you're pointing to says that among people who have been previously infected, those who have been given vaccines are less likely to be reinfected than those who have not.
There is no error from the CDC here, nor any lost credibility.
With the absence of evidence in either direction, it is unwise to draw either conclusion.
An alternate conclusion to your own is that people who get the vaccine did so in order to take advantage of the reduced restrictions on vaccinated people at the time.
The discourse has become politicized, unfortunately, and for whatever reasons the voices of the pro-vaccine faction in the U.S. have become dominated by people who reflexively discount the science. This doesn't seem to be the case in Europe, where the EU-wide immunity passport treats those with prior documented infection the same as the fully vaccinated. This was pointed out to me on HN a few weeks ago, when I opined that it would be logistically impractical to verify and issue immunity passports to the previously infected.
Would it be better if those with a previous infection received a vaccine? Maybe. That's a more complex question. But at this juncture that's moving the goal posts; it's scientifically and politically unreasonable to make that demand.