Note the "longer lasting and stronger".
> is longer lasting than from the vaccine
I really hope we don't end up with a Marek's disease, but in humans.
In the UK, 2% of people who tested positive have died. In the US, 1.7% of people who tested positive have died.
The mortality rate among hospitalized people even higher.
And there's reason to believe from HCoV-229E that immunity against coronaviruses is actually durable and that reinfection is due to mutation and immune escape.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
This is news because the flu doesn’t do that every year or any year since 1919. It’s news because it’s the deadliest pandemic in over a century, and the death rate in some areas is at its peak and climbing, despite higher vaccination rates then a typical flu season.
I cannot understand why denial of this information is so important to you, but if you continue to spread doubt about taking more precautions than the flu, people may listen to you and those people may die.
625K war casualties[1] < 635K COVID-19 casualties[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
I'm coming at this more from the perspective that the panic over delta being something straight out of a Big Bad TV Trope that breaks all the previous rules, is that it completely undermines the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign. The current best antivaxxer argument right now is just that all the headlines show that the vaccines don't work. I'm pushing back against that. It still looks to me like nobody has given me any indications the vaccines don't work. I think their VE against delta has been dramatically understated, the waning immunity has not been proven, and their efficacy against transmission is probably a lot higher than currently assumed.
At some point in the future I'll agree with the perspective that we need to start treating this more like the flu, but if the hospital systems are falling over we aren't there yet.
But that doesn't mean the mRNA vaccines would be failures.
Focusing on the spike was also done because mRNA vaccines against the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-1 showed evidence of ADE in animals models so nobody wanted to go down that road. That decision to run with the spike protein is very unlikely to be shown to ever be a mistake in hindsight and will have been the right choice (and certainly the right choice given the information at the right time and a decision which produced an entirely successful vaccine).
It is also a really pretty safe bet that this virus will evolve to achieve immune escape just like HCoV-229E does and will start reinfecting everyone again. That won't make this vaccine a failure. And that's a good thing since its more likely that forcing it to evolve to achieve immune escape will force it to made tradeoffs between immune escape and transmissibility/virulence/fitness.
You're right that the recent pre-print cited by GP - regarding the data out of Israel - does not prove or disprove any specific mechanistic explanation.
However, interpreting GPs comment charitably, that study does support the notion that immunity acquired through natural infection may be more robust to mutations and variants - the mechanisms of which have been articulated in a variety of other literature. See my sibling comment [1] for supporting citations and excerpts.
But is is acknowledged in the article linked here:
>> Specifically, antibodies elicited by the mRNA vaccine were more focused to the RBD compared to antibodies elicited by an infection, which more often targeted other portions of the spike protein. Importantly, the vaccine-elicited antibodies targeted a broader range of places on the RBD than those elicited by natural infection.
It does not follow that vaccination conveys better immunity than previous infection. Only better response to mutations in one area of the spike protein. Nothing else is being claimed in this paper.
Why is that? I have no background in immunology so it's mildly surprising to me.
But now we're back to speculation about mechanism, which GP was opposed to.
I find that surprising. Why did you expect that? Why should I have expected that?
Apparently it is a surprise for USA and Europe as the former only recognize infection based immunity for three months and the latter recognizes it for 6 months, while some EU member states recognize vaccine based immunity for 8 months.
please do not make stuff up to fit your narrative.
No, it does not.
The data from Israel only supports the claim that immunity from infection is longer lasting than from the vaccine, which should not have been a surprise to anyone.
It does not support any specific mechanistic explanation.