I'm not sure I care where people get their antibodies from as long as they're effective, but since you're here, mind my asking what the aversion is to the vaccine now? Is it a convenience factor, or not wanting to deal with being sick, or something else? The risks seem fairly well established at this point, from what I've been able to see.

Even if there's no proven benefit, there's plenty of things in life we almost all do because of possible benefit, so this just seems like another one of those case. We buy insurance in case we might need it. We wear seat belts even though the crash might be such that they provide no benefit. What's the point that tips you over the edge of not wanting the vaccine in this case? My understanding is that for a short inconvenience (in both time and physical well being) and zero cost you get something that might prove extremely beneficial later.

It might prove to be bad too. There have been adverse reactions to the vaccine. Is that likely to happen to me? Probably less likely than a person chosen at random given prior exposure to the virus, but why risk it?

My Covid experience was not life threatening, but it was no walk in the park either. I've had more than enough of that crap in my body, thank you very much. (Yes, I understand the difference between the virus and the vaccine, in fact that's why the real deal is thought to offer better immunity.)

There really is no argument in favor of getting it at this time, just peoples cognitive bias.

Wait. Your fearmongering about adverse reactions to the vaccine, but you acknowledge that you had an adverse reaction to COVID and indeed, the # of people with serious COVID complications dwarfs those with vaccine complications by orders of magnitude.

Also, this study doesn't seem to segment what the strain the 'natural infection'. The current vaccines are not engineered from the delta strain, but the alpha strains, and therefore it is not surprising you get breakthrough infections. But they don't seem to distinguish in this study between a natural alpha or a natural delta infection.

And there is an argument for getting it at this time:

1) If you get a booster, the chances of re-infection/breakthrough go down. In other words, you will not be an infectious disease vector that spreads to other people and increases the R0 value.

2) If you don't, and get re-infected, you will go on to infect other people. Maybe the symptoms won't be bad for you, but they may be deadly to someone else.

Whenever these debates about vaccines or masks come up, people always talk about my body and my freedom, but they never seem to consider the fact that their decisions are actually impacting the wider community. This isn't like a libertarian property rights decision about your own fenced in property, when you are infected by COVID, you are invading other people's bodies from your territory, and it behooves you to try and stop spreading to other people.

It’s confusing - alpha is not the original strain. It’s the original variant.

The vaccines are based on the original strain, not the alpha variant.

Everyone's decisions affect everyone.

Anyone who used a plane. Went to work. Went out to eat. Left their home. All put society are risk. Have you left your home in the last year? If so you have put others at risk.

Not all risks are the same, either in probability, or expected value, or avoidability or cost to mitigate. You're just trying to hand wave away the argument.

The cost-benefit of a mask compared with the cost-benefit of never leaving your home. You sure these two scenarios are equal?

Masks are a bad joke. Respirators are the only thing that work with aerosol size particles and covid is well below the size that aerosols are classed at. See Edwards et al 2/23/2021 (figure 4.) for a start. Go and read the package insert on an N95 mask (the weakest kind of respirator), it warns they are not suitable for asbestos particles which are many times larger than the covid virus. Masks leak because they are impossible to seal, they don't do anything beneficial. The infection rates in schools in Florida where some were under mask mandates and others were not were identical and tracked the general community rates.

Congratulations on being another vector for misinformation.

It has never been the case that anyone suggested that N95 masks could stop the passage of naked SARS-COV-2 particles.

However, when ejected from the respiratory passages during breathing, coughing, sneezing, the viral particles are not naked, but bound into much larger particles comprised mostly of bodily fluids. N95 masks do a stellar job of preventing the passage of such particles. Yes, edge sealing is an issue, but it is completely incorrect to claim that as a result "they don't do anything beneficial". Citing a single statistic from schools in Florida is not a legitimate way of overturning worldwide, vast-N studies that support the efficacy of mask wearing.

In general, would you rather a person open sneezed at you with or without a mask?

In my entire life, no one has directly sneezed on me except for my own kids when they were little. I'd rather they cover with their elbow than us all wear a mask.

If they are covid infectious, I've already inhaled their particles before they sneezed if we were both wearing surgical masks. See that study I referenced.

You should watch some of those clever (thermal?) imaging videos of what happens when people sneeze when using various kinds of coverings (or none at all).

The aerosol spray from even an elbow-covered sneezed is something to behold.

The favourite trick of misinformation purveyors is stripping away context.

Then they can hide behind equivocation.

Risk is risk! Even manifest risk is risk!

I do wonder what is disagreeable about what was said here. This is the reasoning for vaccines around the world.

the best efficacy numbers come from a combination of viral exposure and vaccination, the greatest risk comes from infection with the virus.

there is a feature of the spike protien that is partially stealthy; it is conformational change.

the vaccine generates modified spike protien that is locked into conformation so that immune response is biased toward a spike protien with RBD extended to infect a cell.

natural infection will generate such response however to a lower degree, further however opsinizing responses are generated, thus provoking memory immunity.

the vaccine is biased toward producing antibodies that bind to the receptor binding domain of the spike, thus producing binding inhibition of RBD ACE2 recognition thus prophylaxis.

there is a hypothetical sweet spot where vaccine induced antibody titre is at peak and will inhibit viral entry and spike RBD dynamics, meaning reduced chance of unmanaged infection and reduced severity of illness due to perturbation of the RAS system via ACE2 interference

Nobody on this site but yourself truly cares what you, personally, do. This entire subthread is about what people in general do.

And it's not particularly surprising that people here find that vaccine reticence is absurd, whether you've caught the thing or not.

I likely caught COVID early on (unproven), and I was part of a clinical trial for a vaccine, where I got two real shots of CureVac. The clinical trial didn't pass and I had to get two more shots of Moderna so I could count as vaccinated for things like events and travels.

Overkill? Yes. Unnecessary? Almost definitely. Annoying to do? Well I did get fever from two of the four shots so yes.

Still did it, and would do it again if I have to, because there is zero fucking risk compared to anything we do in the day to day life such as crossing the street.

I'm on a bicycle for several hours a week roaming the streets of Brussels. I will statistically die from that.

You are not wrong about the efficacy of naturally acquired immunity. It's not a hard call at all. There is a clear order of magnitude plus difference. The math is super simple.

It can be maddening, and make you feel like you live in crazy town, to not see people acknowledge this, and to have leaders at the CDC spout pure lies about it over and over again.

Here's how I made peace with it.

Pfizer will sell $33B worth of vaccines this year. The annual budgets of every news organization in America sum to $10B. So Pfizer's COVID revenue alone could pay for every newsroom all across America, and they'd still have $23B left over. And then there's Moderna, J&J, CVS, and so on.

There are an enormous amount of people working full time and part-time to promote and sell as many vaccines as possible. The biggest competitor to the vax is naturally acquired immunity. So that in particular is a big target of the shills and censors.

People always respond to incentives. This is not specific to the vax industry, and is all around us. I guess the surprising thing is how there may be no exceptions to that rule.

Looking at the data, I see no reason for anyone who's naturally recovered to get it, nor anyone under 20. If you haven't had COVID and are over 30, I think it's a good bet.

Personally I want as many people to have as much immunity to covid as possible, in order to limit (and ideally eradicate) the spread of covid. So the stronger your immunity gets, the more likely it is you will harbor less virus and therefore less likely to spread it to others.

Also, over the last year and a half, my mom went into chemo for like 6 months, had a minor heart attack (and was in the ICU twice for almost two weeks), and went into the ER recently—the majority of those times the hospital wouldn't even let me or my dad into the hospital to visit because covid cases were so high.

For me, the goal is societal (global) reduction or eradication of the virus and for that so that we don't have to argue about masks or vaccines or watch friends and family die or get wickedly sick.

Since there are multiple animal reservoirs your eradication goal is impossible. The most likely scenario is that we'll all be infected eventually no matter what we do. Fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing death.

Fair point on the reservoirs. Then I'd hope that thru vaccines, we train our immune system to get better and better at responding to the virus without having to take on the full viral load. I read an article a few months back describing how the immune system is like an info gathering machine, trying to catalog different threats that exist, and I dunno, I guess I just prefer to practice how to swim in a controlled pool than being tossed into the ocean.

Then why shouldn't people with natural immunity (whether vaccinated or not) demand the vaccinated be intentionally exposed to COVID? (And quarantine after exposure.)

Presuming risk of severity of breakthrough cases is as low as we've been told (over and over), isn't demanding intentional exposure a justifiable risk, if it improves a vaccinated individual's immunity to the levels of natural immunity?

Does it make a difference if risk of breakthrough infection severity ends up being lower than risk of vaccine side-effect severity?

well I'd assume that one can also get more immunity thru more vaccine shots and it's a much less risky strategy (aka no virus that can self-replicate) than intentionally exposing oneself to the virus.

Not by the logic that's been applied up to now. "Better immunity is worth the personal risk of vaccination" is the mantra that's been repeated over and over to those who already had covid.

All of a sudden risk-benefit analysis is debatable? Why is breakthrough infection not a risk worth taking, but vaccine side effects are?

Especially vaccine risk vs the limited marginal benefit for those with natural immunity?

If the breakthrough infection risk is lower to oneself and to others than the vaccine risk is to oneself and to others, then I think it would make sense to encourage people to expose themselves to the virus as a way to increase immunity.

I currently believe that the vaccine is much lower short-term risk to oneself (and especially to others) than getting a breakthrough infection. I also believe that the vaccines probably have lower medium- and long-term risks as well.

So yes, for me, if the risk equation changes, I'd be open to changing course. Until then, vaccines seem to be much lower in risk to oneself and to others than the virus itself.

Would you agree?

I agree the logic is internally consistent.

I also think it's absolutely absurd and that people will justify anything. Especially if they're already committed to it, and don't want to find out they're previous actions were nothing but show.

Including "you should intentionally get sick to prevent you from possibly unintentionally getting sick."

Which actions do you think were for show?

it is not impossible to make informed intelligent decisions regarding your behavior, or the situations you choose to become involved in. there are behavioral alternatives that will minimise your risk and others risk, these alternatives are not for everyone, the psychological challenge of social isolation is not bourne well by many people, however it was the best we had until vaccine production was sufficient to provide population scale administration.

please believe me, this is not fear mongering when i say that the >potential< risk posed if this virus generates omega strain variation [hypothetical doomsday strain] would be large and unmanagable.

this can happen if, long road taken variations accumulate over time as a result of unchecked transmission and incubation.

the short road is co-circulation of variants recombining genetic elements as a result of concurrent multivariant infection.

...and apology accepted, i see you are very passionate about your decision

That's just unscientific fear mongering nonsense. Humans are social creatures. For most people social isolation is more harmful than the virus. The human race has already survived previous coronavirus pandemics and they didn't cause doomsday.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

you are wrong this is not fear mongering, this is a high potential of increased danger with each successive modification, please explain what bottleneck eliminated the majority of hominoid species but left us here.

Our ancestors eliminated the majority of hominid species, leaving us here. There is no scientific evidence that any early hominid species was wiped out by a viral pandemic.

there is plenty of genetic evidence linking neanderthal genetic features to outcome of disease and genetic infirmity, as well as outcome of covid infection, primarily to do with interferon production and signaling, as well as receptor domains, these are heteroallelic as well, so strong neanderthal heritage with respect to population at large may provide a protective allele, or a predispositional allele.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/neanderthal-gene-fou...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.11.422139v1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201215/Neanderthal-gene-...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2025501

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2026309118

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.11.422139v1

You should risk it because the risk really is minimal and the greater benefit for society is enormous. I don't think people have cognitive bias. There are plenty of arguments in favor of getting it.

Dude! The risk may be small, but it is not zero.

For someone who already has natural immunity, that matters.

If serious adverse events are 1 in 100,000 - and I believe they are higher the younger you are - then that's significantly better odds than playing the lottery to end up hurt.

And for what?

"The greater benefit for society" is actually negative if you've been confirmed to have natural immunity.

If there's any point that you have to argue against this, I'd hope you make it instead of throwing out assertions.

> "The greater benefit for society" is actually negative if you've been confirmed to have natural immunity.

No, it's not. The very linked article and many others agree that people exposed to both scenarios have more effective, longer lasting immunity than the ones affected by either scenario individually.

And the adverse effect risk of a vaccine is not a lottery. At this point with billions of people vaccinated around the world, the risk profiles are pretty accurate, the side effects very well known and unless you are a kid under 18, all vaccines being widely distributed in western countries - which are the ones I cared to do any research on - are effectively zero risk.

>At this point with billions of people vaccinated around the world, the risk profiles are pretty accurate

No. With out no strictly mandated reporting of AEFIs, billions of administrated doses cannot indicate a safety profile..

Even with around 1% events reported, the serious events are around 1 in 5000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28311640

>If serious adverse events are 1 in 100,000

They are not. They are like 1 in 5000 (still based on volutary reporting)

https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/COVID-19/vaccine-report-overview...

Ask these exact questions to the person who originally hesitated to vaccinate and got COVID.

The risk of hospitalisation/death wasn’t zero. And yet… they chose COVID through inaction.

And for what?

“I am not an anti-vaxxer but was holding out” spells “I am an anti-vaxxer but I lucked out”.

_Nobody_ chose COVID.

And, in the early days, there was no vaccine.

In the middle days, the vaccines that were made were used.

Now, those who shun a free vaccine - and haven't already caught COVID - are choosing not to lower their risk of contracting COVID in that one way... But that doesn't really help your argument.

Guess you don’t understand default choice, huh?

Choosing not to choose commits you to the status quo: risk of COVID hospitalisation/death.

Then by that logic, you should risk a breakthrough infection to achieve natural immunity levels.

Because breakthrough severity risk is "minimal" and the greater benefit for society is enormous.

There are plenty of arguments for increasing your immunity by catching it.

It's not zero cost, there is some risk.

Maybe someone could do the math but the chances of catching covid again with natural immunity should be lower than the chance of a side effect from the vaccine.

More so, the effects of covid with immunity are much more diminished. The side effects of the vaccine range from very mild to very severe (death). https://openvaers.com/covid-data

I don't see a good reason for a person with natural immunity to get the vaccine if there is no benefit and some, even if slight, risk.

"Because everyone else is doing it" is not a good reason for people to do it because the more you scale the more side effects you get, the more absolute deaths and critical conditions.

VAERS is a flawed data set, because it is pure correlation, not causation. Quoting VAERS: "When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event."

You could get the vaccine, and then days later, you get diarrhea, or a headache, or a charlie horse in your calf, and you reason "oh, it must have been the vaccine", and boom it goes into VAERS: garbage in, garbage out.

VAERS is best realized as a regulatory capture of the personal injury lawyer industry.

It's not perfect, but there's some use to it, are you saying we should not collect and analyze adverse reactions after vaccination?

The reported adverse reactions are very serious and only occurred after the vaccine a lot of times in an otherwise healthy individual.

It should be used as a canary of safety and each report should be evaluated to see if the vaccine is the causation, especially when the individual was healthy.

Ignoring reports of adverse reactions is not proper science. Sure, we could dismiss ALL of the reports as coincidences, but is that right?

VAERS also states the data is under-reported, because not all side effects are reported to VAERS. This means for all false reports there could be true side effects not reported, this evens out the cases to some extent.

> You could get the vaccine, and then days later, you get diarrhea, or a headache, or a charlie horse in your calf,

Look at the side effects listed, it's full paralysis, death, miscarriages, etc. These are serious events that should be looked into. Those are much more rare cases than a "headache", or "diarrhea". Headaches are not reported to VAERS.

You have to compare it to the background rate to tease out signal from noise. That said any intervention (including a vaccine) carries non-zero risk. Taking aspirin, Zantac, laxatives, NyQuil etc., all can destroy you, but it’s rare.

The safety monitoring is actually pretty good as well. We caught a 1 in ~100k issue with AZ/JnJ vaccine very early on in the rollout. We caught mild myocarditis (though COVID risk > vaccine for myocarditis). There was even a massive preprint today from Israel around vaccine side effects. Few were concerning. Link to study + summary https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1430636357626466307?s=2...

> “ Bob Wachter of UCSF had a very good thread on Twitter about vaccine rollouts the other day, and one of the good points he made was this one. We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway”

> We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples.

Exactly, that's why I said when you scale up you will get more absolute deaths and critical conditions. There's no point for those very few deaths or reactions to occur if those people had better natural immunity through previous infection.

I think you misunderstood the quote. It is saying that if you take 10 million people the background rate of death, disease, stroke etc., (unrelated to vaccine) will be high and a confounding issue, even if you didn’t give them the vaccine.

Edit: I think you have a point about whether those who have previous infection truly need the vaccine, but the way you are using VAERS data diminishes your point

There is literally a scam based on this statistical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Balt...

In short: in a large enough population with a random distribution of outcomes, you'll eventually have one member of the population who sees "you" (who is picking results at random, but mutually exclusively to individuals) pick the correct result of a sportsgame everytime.

This is the VAERS dataset: because it records any event proximate to vaccination, eventually every event is proximate to vaccination on a long enough timeline with a large enough population. It exists because, yes, they should be looked into...but only if they're occurring at a statistically higher rate then the average rate for the population over the time after vaccination. This is, for example, how AstraZeneca's clotting risk was identified and how the Pfizer myocarditis risk was identified.

With half the population vaccinated, around 1/6th of the disorders diagnoses across the entire population in a year can be expected to happen 4 months after vaccination and be reported in VAERS.

There's about 16,000 new cases of Lupus ever year, there should be around 2,500 cases of Lupus following vaccination that could be reported into VAERS.

I have absolutely no idea why you're being downvoted, other than group-think.

It's weird. And it's everywhere.

There is no doubt that society is in a state of hysteria. This reaches through the scientific process too, so there is reason to question everything

At the heart of science you are taught to question everything. It is a more honest state.

Because the serious proven cases of side effects from the vaccine are astronomically low compared to infection by actual COVID, and vaccines don't result in spread to other people, but natural infections do.

It's just that simple.

What's simple is that if my natural-immunity levels are better than your vaccine-only immunity levels, then you are the greater risk to the public.

And that's whether I decide to get vaccinated or not.

The jury is still out on that, but the question is, how did you attain your natural immunity levels? If it was a breakthrough infection, or because it happened before vaccinations, sure. If it was because you purposely infected yourself, you are a risk to the public, because while your were infected, you spread the disease, and moreover, if you had serious symptoms, you consumed hospital resources and risked frontline workers that would have been better utilized for people were had other illnesses or unavoidable COVID (e.g. immunocompromised)

All I see is a bunch of selfish people with incredibly weak excuses not to get vax'ed or wear masks, often for ostensibly stupid political reasons (e.g. "I'm a libertarian/conservative and no one tells me what to do! Freedom!!!!!" As in, I know motorcycle helmets will save my life, but I refuse to wear one if you tell me I need to, so there!), or based on astronomically rare vaccine complications well below the risk of the disease complications themselves.

Antivaccination beliefs are on par with moon landing hoaxers and flat earthers and deepak chopra followers IMHO. It's intellectual snake oil.

>The jury is still out on that

Lol- any other result and it'd be plastered on billboards along with the hospital population scare numbers.

>motorcycle helmets will save my life

Do you wear a helmet, fire-retardant suit, and 5-point harness in a car? It will save your life.

>based on astronomically rare vaccine complications well below the risk of the disease complications themselves.

Oh- we're saying the jury isn't still out on this one? Even though we've got less than a year of data?

And besides the fact that it ignores individual risk factors, including age, weight, and natural immunity?

My family got it when the cdc said it couldn't possibly be here yet, that masks were worse than no masks, and back before Trump was called xenophobic for wanting to shut down international travel and Nancy said we should go spend money in Chinatown.

And we got it because family members are the front line, dealing with "safe-side" idiots who are the infected ones, but are more worried about catching it "again" from hospital staff with 3 layers of uncomfortable ppe on because they heard that 4 layers is safer.

So take your conspiracy theory projections and shove it. Some people still value autonomy, even if you don't. You have no problem with unnecessary mandated medical treatments, but probably were part of the choir on here last week complaining about "muh device privacy! and muh software freedom!" with apple scanning for blacklisted hashes, and government wanting e2ee backdoors. Why are you worried if you have nothing to hide?

>Antivaccination beliefs are on par with moon landing hoaxers and flat earthers and deepak chopra followers IMHO. It's intellectual snake oil.

LOL- you forgot "Think of the Children!"

I was referring to actual monetary cost. Immediately prior to saying "zero cost" I outlined some other costs (time, physical well being). I'm open to discussions that try to explain other costs (that's why I asked).

There's more to immunity than antibodies. When comparing the effects of vaccines versus prior infections we also need to look at memory T cell activity over an extended period of time. So far I don't think we have any conclusive evidence on that one way or the other.

The J&J and mRNA vaccines (reliably) induce antibodies to the pre-fusion spike protein, so you may have a wider range of antibodies with vaccination than without.

(It's the only target they present to the immune system is why I put reliably; there's no saying infection doesn't induce similar antibodies)

There have been studies suggesting vaccination indeed provides better immunity to mutations.

e.g, Vaccine-induced immunity provides more robust heterotypic immunity than natural infection to emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern:

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-226857/v1

> I'm not an anti-vaxxer but was holding out.

No judgement, just genuinely curious, but what was your reason for holding out?

Not OP but I am in a similar situation where I am holding out too. I am in the 20-29 age group in Canada, healthy, no co-morbidities, I have been regularly exercising for over a decade, eat healthy, don't smoke/drink/drugs etc. Also I believe I have already caught COVID earlier last year (though I wasn't tested so this could be wrong).

There's been a total of 67 deaths in my age group for entire Canada in entire 20 months of the disease. Even the hospitalization in the entire 20 months for my age group has been 3,144 which isn't much in my eyes. And vast majority of these occurred in people who had pre-existing conditions.

And as it has now been widely reported, vaccinated can not only catch covid, they have the same (and sometimes higher) viral load as unvaccinated and can infect others. And the vaccine is waning off in 3-6 months. So I don't see how me getting vaccinated is "for the common good".

Canada is also 2-3 months behind Israel in terms of COVID trends (case peaks). So what's happening in Israel right now will happen in 2-3 months from Canada.

So I don't see how I can benefit from it and am willing to take chances.

What we should be doing is saving the vaccines for the elders for booster shots and working on improved vaccines for the new variants. There's a huge population in the world which can't even get their first dose of vaccine while here we are giving out 3rd doses.

>they have the same (and sometimes higher) viral load as unvaccinated and can infect others.

The higher part is categorically untrue. The 'same' part is only true in a very narrow sense. Yes, vaccinated individuals have peak viral titers that are the same level as unvaccinated. But vaccinated individual titer levels drop off substantially faster than unvaccinated individuals. So, while an immunologically naive individual might be infectious for 5 or 6 days, a vaccinated individual may only be infectious for 1 or 2.

This is exactly what one would predict based on our understanding of the human immune system. Memory B cells that respond to the antigen would start kicking out antibodies. Some will also undergo further affinity maturation with the Delta antigen. Affinity maturation of these B cells will occur much faster since the target is already very close.

>And the vaccine is waning off in 3-6 months. So I don't see how me getting vaccinated is "for the common good".

As stated above, you would be less infectious having had the vaccine.

One thing to consider is that the outcome of COVID is not 'alive or dead'. There is a spectrum of outcomes that are not captured in official mortality statistics. While it's not clear exactly what that spectrum is (e.g. how many long covid cases really exist), I would note that there are a lot of anecdotes out there about athletes that can't climb a flight of stairs 12 months out after covid.

> The higher part is categorically untrue. The 'same' part is only true in a very narrow sense.

3 studies showing that vaccinated have the same viral load as unvaccinated. When we are talking about many variable numbers, especially of a highly transmissible one, if something can be same, then there are also cases of them being higher.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.19.21260808v...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm

> We find no difference in viral loads when comparing unvaccinated individuals to those who have vaccine “breakthrough” infections. Furthermore, individuals with vaccine breakthrough infections frequently test positive with viral loads consistent with the ability to shed infectious viruses. Our results, while preliminary, suggest that if vaccinated individuals become infected with the delta variant, they may be sources of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to others.

> One thing to consider is that the outcome of COVID is not 'alive or dead'. There is a spectrum of outcomes that are not captured in official mortality statistics. While it's not clear exactly what that spectrum is (e.g. how many long covid cases really exist), I would note that there are a lot of anecdotes out there about athletes that can't climb a flight of stairs 12 months out after covid.

I am aware. And that's why I have made my own calculated decision. Things such as what to inject in my body are deeply personal choices and I have done my cost vs benefit analysis to conclude I will skip the current vaccine until it gets updated to be more effective for longer periods of time and when long term studies have been done. There's a certain risk we are all willing to take in making decisions. I am willing to take this risk.

Especially when the data is consistently changing. What's the guarantee than the efficacy won't further drop in the next 3-6 months? Nor will there be any long term studies for a while. I can also sympathize with many in the black, hispanic and Philippine community who have severe distrust in the medical community.

Just look at the number of deaths and serious injuries which happen in my age group of 20-29:

https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/motor-vehicle-sa...

That doesn't mean I stop being in a car (even though I don't drive).

Plus I have most likely already caught covid last year (I have never been sick in over 11 years except last year with very similar symptoms).

>When we are talking about many variable numbers, especially of a highly transmissible one, if something can be same, then there are also cases of them being higher.

So, you went with your feelings as opposed to scientific backing on that one. By that rational, they could also be lower too. In fact, they could be on average lower. That statement, however, has some backing. From a vastly larger and more random survey:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/research-and-impact/grou...

>The 13th round of the REACT-1 study looked at swab test data from almost 100,000 people in England between 24 June and 12 July. The research found that infections were three times lower in people who were fully vaccinated, compared to unvaccinated people. The data also suggested that people who were fully vaccinated were less likely to pass the virus on to others, due to having a lower viral load on average and therefore shedding less virus.

I states

> they have the same (and sometimes higher) viral load

The "same" is surely a fact as has been shown by 3 studies. The sometimes higher doesn't mean always higher - it means it can be sometimes higher, sometimes lower but on average, it's been determined to be the same. So it's not based on my "feelings".

What matters is how these will turn out in 3-6 more months. When vast majority of people around the world still haven't gotten a single dose while us healthy and young people are being pushed to take it, it doesn't seem well advised in my eyes. They should be saving these for the elders and especially the ones in poorer countries.

The particular issue is, why specifically mention "sometimes higher" if there are no studies to back up that assertion or if you're going to rationalize your assertion on inferences about statistical noise? "Sometimes", "could", and "can" are doing the work of Atlas here. It's a genuinely pointless thing to say and somewhat bewildering to see someone continue to defend.

It's important to note the population of those 3 studies. For generally symptomatic individuals that sought testing, were hospital system patients, or were contact traced individuals, respectively, viral loads(Ct values) are similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Even your first cited paper mentions deficiencies for asymptomatic individuals: >It is also difficult to determine the rate of asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic breakthrough infections and to ascertain whether viral loads in such cases are as high as those in symptomatic breakthrough infections. The “true” proportion of breakthrough infections with high viral loads would require comprehensive, frequent surveillance testing of vaccinated populations to identify these individuals.

The REACT-1 study data is from a large, random sampling of the population.

  > They should be saving these for the elders and especially the ones in poorer countries.

dont they just throw away the vaccine if its not used?

if that's true, im not sure how declining to get a free vaccine helps the elderly...

This study by FAIR Health attempted to assess the prevalence of Long COVID from billions of US healthcare claims looking for problems that occurred 30+ days after a diagnosis of COVID-19:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/media2.fairhealth.org/whitepaper/as...

> And as it has now been widely reported, vaccinated can not only catch covid, they have the same viral load as unvaccinated and can infect others.

They have the same viral load if they get infected. But the mRNA vaccines still reduce the chance of being infected by about 80% (according to [1]), which in effect reduces the chance of infecting others.

> And the vaccine is waning off in 3-6 months.

Its effectiveness goes down, but it would likely take years for it to go to zero. Regardless, that's what booster shots are for.

> There's a huge population in the world which can't even get their first dose of vaccine while here we are giving out 3rd doses.

True.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.18.21262237v...

Please don't hang out in public & around vulnerable people (kids, elderly) or those who live with them. There's only one way to be responsibly unvaccinated, and that's very cautiously.

(This whole "vaccinated people have higher viral loads of Delta in their mouths" thing makes me doubt your understanding of the science, as well.)

“Kids” are actually the least vulnerable people, when it comes to this virus.

> This whole "vaccinated people have higher viral loads of Delta in their mouths" thing makes me doubt your understanding of the science, as well.

Why are changing what I said? I never said mouth. Where are you getting that from?

Please refrain from using snark and ad-hominem attacks on HN. Especially when you yourself seem to not understand that kids are the least vulnerable group.

> And as it has now been widely reported, vaccinated can not only catch covid, they have the same viral load as unvaccinated and can infect others.

Widely reported and wildly inaccurate.

They studied patients with ‘breakthrough’ infections, i.e. where the vaccine didn’t work. And guess what they found? The vaccine didn’t work!!

You're probably better off if what's being said about anti-body monoculture from vaccine acquired immunity is true. You'd have higher probability of resistance to variants given the greater diversity of anti-bodies leftover from naturally acquired immunity.

From a recent BBC article on immunity, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58270098

> There is a whole different suite of antibodies (known as immunoglobulin As) in the nose and lungs, compared with those (immunoglobulin Gs) that we measure in the blood. The former is more important as a barrier to infection. Natural infection, because it is in the nose rather than a jab in the arm, may be a better route to those antibodies, and nasal vaccines are being investigated too.

Intramuscular (arm injection) vs intranasal (inhaled) vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28165287

Nasal vaccine trials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28284504

A friend who got corona in the first wave went to donate plasma to a critical patient, this was 4 months after his infection. His plasma tests indicated that his antibodies had severely reduced and doctors suggested that he take the vaccine as he was not immune anymore (or wouldn't be in a few months). This is one of the many plasma donor cases I've read about, specially in India. I don't really trust word of mouth cases but this one was a real life friend. Maybe try getting some bloodwork done and confirming this with an immunologist. Stay safe nonetheless.

edit- this post has made me realize how many people on hn are holding out on th vaccines. Kinda unexpected and sad.

You don't need antibodies to be immune. The body also develops T-cells which are much longer lasting.

You are a name caller. There are downsides to getting the vaccine. I know people who were down and out with side effects to the vaccine for a week. If this is accurate, then people who had covid are 18x protected vs those vaccinated.

Maybe we should introduce a covid card and only let those with them into restaurants. After all, it is likely that the combination of the reopening and breakthrough caused the spike.

I stand by my statement about name calling. The person who has had covid is less likely to spread it to others than someone with just the vaccine.

I see little point in forcing them to take the vaccine much less enforce a vaccine mandate. If you want a mandate it should be natural immunity or vaccine or mask or far better just tests and masks since anyone can still catch and spread it.

You are right about 13x. I just misread that (reading on my iPhone).

I was not concerned with cost so I am not going to bother to address that.

Name calling is okay, if true. If someone is an anti-vaxxer, not calling them such only supports that extremely harmful movement. Preventing calling them anti-vaxxes is literally censorship, and likely something that you are against.

Society locked me down for 18 months already without any regard of my individual wellbeing, risk tolerance and the fact that I got natural immunity early.

So why should I care about the well-being of the society?

(I still do, because I’m a good person, but I feel no “social contract” obligation whatsoever.)

The choice is not black-and-white as you insist. Yes public policy pronouncements ("get vaccinated") must be simple and unequivocal, but my personal, informed, personal-biology choices do not need to be so.

Further, governments and big pharma have made huge mistakes or have perpetrated ulterior motives ask through their history. Recent science is no more immune to politicking and groupthink than the hamfisted past.

I'll rationally take my natural immunity as sufficient and not alter my biology further and superfluously with an experimental, non-recourse drug.

Side-effect databases severely systematically underreport mild chronic harm, such as, who knows, a couple points of IQ decline or vascular damage in certain internal organs. No thanks. I'll avoid the untestable hypothesis that the my harm is worth the societal good.

There are many rational reasons for not doing it.

Just because you disagree does not make them irrational, or a person who chooses not to get this vaccine "antivaxxer".

Take a look at CDC VAERS for many rational reasons[1] why people may not want to do this, especially kids.

When choosing to undergo a medical procedure or to take a medication one must always do a risk/reward analysis. This is known as informed consent.

We should encourage this, not name call those who elect to do so.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

>With indications that the real deal is more effective at providing future immunity (simple logic suggests that too)

Simple logic does not suggest that at all. When you're infected, your immune system crushes up and snorts various pieces of the virus to try to understand how to recognize it. The antibodies it makes "naturally" are only effective for the bits on the virus' surface that it can see. It also does so in a moderated way so it doesn't accidentally kill healthy cells. If it happened to snort up a bit on the inside of the virus, it won't help as much as if it snorted up a surface bit.

The RNA vaccine specifically encodes for a highly visible, relatively well-preserved segment of virus (the spike protein), and it comes with an adjuvant that makes your immune system ever so slightly overreact at the site of injection. Your immune system will then go on to "naturally" create antibodies via the same crush and snort process, but they'll tend to be specifically tailored to recognizing the surface spike.

So no, it's not simple logic at all. A simpleton's logic maybe, but not simple.

the way you describe it sounds like the natural way is more resistant to mutations. And the low efficacy of the current vaccines against delta dovetails well to it.

>they'll tend to be specifically tailored to recognizing the surface spike

the situation is worse than that. Most of the current covid vaccines are targeting only a segment of the spike protein, and all those segments are largely overlap, ie. union of those segments of different vaccines isn't much bigger than their intersection, so just a couple of mutations (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...) is enough for the virus to escape almost all of those vaccines.