Another factor I have come across is that it may be that natural immunity is more variant specific while the vaccine results in a immune response to a wider array of variants. This seems like it may be valid considering the situation in Brazil[2] and with our understanding of the flu, but I am not sure the mechanism for this.
Lastly (as mentioned in another comment) it can create perverse incentives where people will do something like "covid parties" to gain natural immunity which would make things worse.
The vaccine on the other hand has a dose which is of a known quantity and the response from that dose is well understood across many demographics. So it may come down to the fact that we understand the vaccine response better than natural responses.
I'm not saying whether or not any of this is a good enough reason not to allow for natural immunity to be just as valid, but it's what I have come to understand (which may be incorrect) based on the data we have.
Are those people then supposed to take the mRNA vaccines in addition, if not, why are people with natural immunity required to get an additional vaccine (among them J&J)?
[1]https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/so-you-got-jj-vaccine-her...
Can you explain why you don't believe the same would apply to the immune response elicited by vaccines?
There are breakthrough cases in people who are just a couple of months out from their second dose of even Pfizer and Moderna, and not all of these people are in age and risk groups where one would expect a poor immune response. So clearly YMMV with the vaccines as well.
> Another factor I have come across is that it may be that natural immunity is more variant specific while the vaccine results in a immune response to a wider array of variants.
The science actually indicates the opposite of what you suggest. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04060-7
> While individual memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination, the overall neutralizing potency of plasma is greater following vaccination.
So basically, if you recovered from natural infection, your memory B cells will be "better" than those generated by vaccination in terms of their potency and breadth (which speaks to the potential to deal with variants), but people who have been vaccinated have more potent neutralizing antibodies immediately following vaccination.
The problem, which can be seen in places like Israel, is that the neutralizing antibodies don't stick around forever. In fact, the latest data[1] suggests these antibodies wane quite rapidly (in as little as a couple of months) in those vaccinated with Pfizer. This is discouraging but not surprising. It doesn't make sense for the body to keep high levels of neutralizing antibodies circulating indefinitely every time you're exposed to a new pathogen.
The question: is the world prepared to boost everyone every 2-3 months to keep our veins flowing with high levels of neutralizing antibodies?
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/health/pfizer-vaccine-waning-...
Many anti-vax and conspiracy-oriented people unfortunately have the false belief that COVID-19 infection is a trivial matter or a hoax. Consequently, some may resort to pox parties [0] as a way to avoid vaccination. And yes, people have tried this:
> And this was no ordinary party–it was a “COVID party”, where guests tried to intentionally get the virus to “build up natural immunity” without getting vaccinated. [1]
If people were to intentionally try to gain immunity through exposure, at least 5% of them (and their subsequent infected contacts) will end up in the hospital, consuming healthcare resources. That seems a foolish risk to take, politically. The aforementioned people who tried it in Alberta ended up filling several beds in the hospital:
> A party west of Edmonton has landed several people in the hospital with COVID-19, sources have confirmed to CityNews. [1]
In reality, if you've already had COVID it is a trivial act to get vaccinated. That vaccination will help boost your immune response to the disease and may even help to limit your risk of breakthrough infection. I can't see a serious, legitimate reason to not get the vaccine in such cases. And to allow otherwise creates dangerous incentives.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pox_party
[1]: https://www.660citynews.com/2021/09/23/alberta-covid-party-h...
I am vaccinated but by some sloppy internet dictionaries an "anti-vaxxer" because I oppose mandatory vaccination. This shifting in policy was predicted by a lot of the more crazier groups, which makes their statements true. You may not want to give people false incentives...
You are only measuring "benefit" to the individual. They're mandated to do something with zero cost and minimal risk. And it comes with massive benefit to the group and to the public as a whole.
They're being mandated because there is a huge cost to infection. The Canadian government pays an average of $23,000 for every person that gets hospitalized by COVID. [0] Roughly 5% of those infected require hospitalization. And we have already seen numerous people blocked from timely access to healthcare due to hospitals being filled with COVID patients.
It's good public policy to require vaccination. Providing incentive to get infected is a really bad idea because it will result in healthcare resources being massively oversubscribed. Besides, infection-acquired immunity is not permanent. The virus mutates and it is likely that additional vaccination will eventually be required for subsequent variants.
[0] : https://www.cihi.ca/en/covid-19-hospital-stays-cost-3-times-...
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...
“In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.”
However, it's worth emphasizing that none of that invalidates the parent commenter's claim that vaccination provides significant additional protection against reinfection for people who've already had COVID, as the study linked in the press release finds.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/28/world/covid-delta-va...
As to which is better, there are studies showing higher protection from vaccination alone than prior infection, and other showing the opposite. It’s complicated in part because the pandemic has been around for significant periods so the timing of infection vs vaccination matters. Further, infection doesn’t provide a uniform level of protection and of course the details get deep. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31235-6?_re...
And of course from a public health standpoint a positive Covid test isn’t guaranteed to represent an actual infection.
So you admit to listing one small study that states A while knowingly ignoring the other studies that argue the opposite? The NIH-funded study and Israel’s data are relevant counterpoints in this discussion.
I granted severe infections do result in a strong immune response, but simply having a positive test result isn’t the sign of long term immunity people assume. That said, surviving COVID also implies a healthy immune system which is a rather morbid example of survivorship bias.
You were overly dismissive in your first mention of this. Do you have data behind the tests being false positive? Multiple positive tests + symptoms are surely sufficient
In a study of 14 of the approved tests, one of the tests gave false positives more than 15% of the time, and three others gave false positives more than 10% of the time. https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/which-COVID-19-te...
You'd think that CDC employees would disclose CDC guidance that might be invalidating the core premise of their study... Consider finding an alternative to CDC. FWIW, UK has pretty good data.
> This report details the findings of a case-control evaluation of the association between vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 reinfection in Kentucky during May–June 2021 [...] Second, persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
> July 28, 2021. Anyone who has been potentially exposed to the virus should get tested, the C.D.C. now says. Previous guidance recommended testing only for fully vaccinated people who were symptomatic.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/28/world/covid-delta-va...
If you really don’t trust US data there is another study out of Israel again showing a single vaccine dose after infection significantly reduces reinfection risks.
The substantive discussion is a separate topic. Given all the facts we know so far, including exponential antibody decay and the obvious need for boosters, looks like the vaccines temporarily raise the antibody levels, and then peter out. Note, I'm not making any claims which immune system stimulus is better long term, vaccines or covid infection. We simply don't understand the long term interplay of the human immune system, the vaccines and the virus. Short term studies amount to 'we put a drop of ink into the ocean, measured the water color 1 second later, yay, the ocean is now black'. Hard to credibly extrapolate them 20 years in the future.
So far we assumed a static virus. The largest risk with the current vaccination campaign is that it is using a monoculture vaccine, teaching the immune system to eliminate a grand total of 1 protein. Even a cursory familiarity with how evolution works in large monoculture populations should raise some red flags. https://www.canr.msu.edu/grapes/integrated_pest_management/h.... Long term the virus is likely to figure out a way to do its thing while escaping the vaccine protection. (It so happens that Pfizer CEO publicly agrees with this position, so there).
Given that it is fundamentally impossible to predict the long term evolution of the pandemic absent a time machine, it is highly unethical to force people take the vaccine using universally reviled tactics like state enforced segregation and discrimination.
(Disclaimer: I am vaccinated and hope for the best).
Antibodies are part of the adaptive immune system but are only produced when the body thinks there is an active infection. To simply greatly long term immunity is maintained via memory B cells because constantly producing antibodies to every disease encountered is untenable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_B_cell
> grand total of 1 protein
That’s not how these vaccines work. A vaccination covers a huge range of mutations in that spike protein as the immune system memorizes multiple targets. Again simplifying it’s like memorizing 4 of your ten fingerprints, lose a finger and you still match the other 3. The protein target is chosen because it is part of the mechanism of infection, without that a simple COVID variant can’t infect you. Of course given enough time it could evolve around this issue but we are not talking about a single mutation.
This is an excellent technical point. Trouble is we already know that we are 'a few mutations away' from a covid variant evading vaccines, which is 'likely' to emerge. A recent Japanese preprint nailed it down to just 4: K417N, N439K, E484K and N501Y.
https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/8/26/22642809/delta...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1
Rachel Walensky, CDC boss, July 2021: "the largest concern that we in public health and science are worried about is that the virus…[becomes] a very transmissible virus that has the potential to evade our vaccines in terms of how it protects us from severe disease and death". A new, more elusive variant could be "just a few mutations away," she said.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021073...
Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO, Aug 2021: "Every time that a variant appears in the world, our scientists are getting their hands around it. And they are researching to see if this variant can escape the protection of our vaccine. We haven't identified any yet, but we believe that it is likely that one day, one of them will emerge."
https://www.insider.com/pfizer-ceo-vaccine-resistant-coronav...
Nature, March 2021: "Our study and the new clinical trial data show that the virus is traveling in a direction that is causing it to escape from our current vaccines and therapies that are directed against the viral spike,” says Ho, the director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Clyde’56 and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-study-coronavirus-va...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03398-2
=====
> long term immunity is maintained via memory B cells because constantly producing antibodies to every disease encountered is untenable
You are reading this backwards. I am not making any claims of what the appropriate level of antibodies ought be for long term immunity. I find "using tainted data we found 2x increase of antibody levels in post-infection + vax compared to just post-infection" studies ridiculous. The people pushing vaccines on people with prior infection, the people pushing boosters, the cottage industry of antigen studies making bold immunity extrapolations are making such claims. Perhaps you should spend some time educating them of basic immune system functions?
I wouldn't mind that much, everybody is free to chose their own risk profile. Right? Then they throw away the democratic norms and practices of past 200 years because they don't get the buyin levels (100%) they were hoping for. That is evil.
” The findings in this report are subject to at least five limitations. First, reinfection was not confirmed through whole genome sequencing, which would be necessary to definitively prove that the reinfection was caused from a distinct virus relative to the first infection.…”
Edited to add: The authors cite [0] to support their claim that it's not significant, it basically seems consistent with their claim that it's really unlikely to still have viral shedding at the duration that they tested at.
Also worth mentioning that adding an equal proportion of false positives to both groups would cause the study to understate the effect size (i.e. the magnitude of the additional protection conferred by vaccines) by biasing the odds ratio in the direction of 1.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
Not to put too fine a point on this, but make no mistake, vaccine or no vaccine, you _will_ get COVID. You'll just be 10x less likely to die from it, although that's being called into question as well by now. Be that as it may if you're on the older side and/or obese, you should get vaccinated if you haven't had COVID yet. I did. I've also lost 15 kilos so far, and I don't intend to take any "boosters".
Alternatively, having survived the first infection says more about the individual than getting a vaccination. Which is yet another way this stuff gets tricky.
Could you point me to them? I'm unable to find any.
Really you can’t draw accurate conclusions from any one study but multiple studies give you a better picture of what’s going on. Large numbers of people falsely believe they had COVID, people who survived COVID are healthier than the general population because the other option is death, the most common infection doesn’t get a strong immune response, vaccine recipients tend to be older and in worse health etc.
That said, an otherwise healthy person who got very sick from COVID and got multiple high quality tests verifying exposure likely does have a significantly better long term protection. But, that’s not representative of the general population that had COVID.
However even the other interpretation is supported by evidence like this. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article Though critically surviving COVID says good things about the immune system even if you didn’t develop an immunity you may still be better off than the average vaccination recipient who tends to be older and in worse health. Which further confuses the issue at the population level.
1) There are varying levels of infection and immunity, and we really don't know how that bell curve works in the population at large.
2) We can't effectively test in order to objectively assess who is naturally protected.
3) From a public policy perspective, it's a total disaster: if we 'require' immunity, a unbelievably large portion of the population will opt to get COVID instead of the vaccine. This is the real kicker right here. If the population acted in any way reasonably, I think that some kind of antibody test, or even declaration from a doctor might work fine. But we are, as a general population, still in the illiterate dark ages.
I spent a day at a family members house where he had his FB profile videos playing out loud - it was the most insane stuff I've ever heard, I thought it was satire, it was not. It was video after video of completely insane conspiracy theorists, most of them total nobodies but trying to gain an audience, extolling unbelievable things. My family member believes that he has access to special 'privileged information' (even though it's just random videos on Facebook) and he utterly will not believe anything that he hears on the news.
The doctors on TV are all liars, the vaccine is a big scam. He's a 'Wolf' while the rest of us are 'Sheep'. Etc..
I would not have believed this new social phenomenon (it's new at least at this scale) until I witnessed it myself - fake information has turned a material portion of the population into zombies.
4) It's moot - the vaccine is safe and effective. So people can just take it and that's that. Conscientious objectors are fine, they just can't work in hospitals, at least for now.
There are over 43 million Americans who have already survived a lab-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. You don't need to test them. Their status can be verified just as easily as a person who has a CDC vaccination card.
Oh but it's "protection" you want to talk about?
The reality is that you can't measure real-world protection in any given individual with natural immunity or vaccine-based immunity. The vast majority of people who have been vaccinated don't test their antibody titers (ever, and over time) and even if they did, there are no validated models for correlating antibody titers to real-world protection. Antibodies aren't the end-all and be-all of immunity. Immunity is complex, and there are a variety of factors (memory T and B cell responses, your overall immune health, the viral loads you're exposed to, etc.) that determine how your body will respond to a pathogen.
Moving away from family anecdotes, here's an actual case: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4307460
A pilot in her 40s who received her second dose of Moderna in early August had a breakthrough infection in October. Data suggests that Moderna is the most effective vaccine and a person in her 40s is not in the age group (65+) where we see vaccine efficacy waning most quickly.
So a person who got the most effective vaccine, who is healthy enough to be a commercial airline pilot, who is not 65+, and who was fully vaccinated for less than 2 months, when her antibody titers would be expected to be very high, can still catch a breakthrough case.
That's interesting, I was not aware of that there was always antibodies to all envelope proteins. Do you have links to more information on the topic?
How does this work when some of the envelope proteins are common, ones that occur in other non-viral sources?
I'd recommend reading about the HIV virion as an example with multiple proteins and needing multiple detected antibodies for a positive diagnosis. It's a good virus to read about due to the immense amount of research put into it.
Where exactly are you seeing evidence that the presence of protein A means antibodies to protein B will not be developed?
Until it wanes, which you don’t know when it does, so you take a booster until you get a breakthrough case because you aren’t immunized, you got a biological shortcut.
What do you mean by this?
With mRNA some cells in your body are tricked into growing so they have some unique but supposedly harmless aspect of the virus, like the spikes. [0] The immune system encounters these cells, recognizes them as not right, terminates and communicates to the larger system to be on the lookout for the molecular markers it found. If traditional vaccine is a trial by fire, then mRNA is trial by flashlight. It simulates some aspects of the fire but not others.
Immunization by mRNA may be better, sufficient or worse than the traditional immunity from actual virus material. I don’t think anyone knows for sure yet but I do know enough big money is riding on mRNA that it may be made to look like the only right approach even if it is only one of several good approaches.
0. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
[1]https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
"In addition, individuals who were previously infected who received one dose of the Pfizer vaccine were even more protected from breakthrough infection than the naturally infected group. There were no deaths in any of the groups examined. Given that previously infected individuals may have had multiple infections prior to the study period, the overall applicability of the study to all populations needs more clarification. Lastly, these findings should not be taken as an endorsement that getting infected is a better overall option for protection than the highly effective vaccines that are available as only those who survived initial infection were eligible for analysis."
For comparison, Norway just lifted covid restrictions. Apparently they have access to a different science than US West coast authorities.
there is not a "crusade to dismiss" VAERS data. There is a push to correctly remind people about the shortcomings of VAERS reports for which that has been the case (and made known[1]) for as long as it has existed. The "crusade" is to use VAERS to misinform people.
> I am vaccinated and favor vaccination
Me too, but that doesn't matter. That should be nobodies business from now on.
If they were to remain consistent then they would also invalidate J&J vaccines given those are viral vector vaccines.
Note: I am vaccinated and favor vaccination for those not exposed or unvaxxed, but I also believe that if you have had Covid19 you do not need MOAR immunity. You already have it.
[1]https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...