There is an appropriate xkcd now:

https://xkcd.com/2557/

There are layers to this.

1) "I'm going to protect myself with natural immunity" with no other context is a stupid statement for the reasons given in the comic. It does feel like people do make this proclamation, but it's likely that they're just leaving relevant context out, and that they're actually in one of the below categories.

2) "I'm not afraid of getting sick myself, so I'm willing to do so early and protect people later" makes a little bit of sense, except that in reality such people (my bias; I could be wrong) tend to infect themselves in an uncontrolled manner that fails to protect others anyway. (I would support a version of the Great Barrington Declaration that was fully controlled, where all infections were consensual. I actually had a run-in with Jeffrey Tucker about this at a libertarian event.)

3) "Tried as I did to avoid it, I got infected anyway. But at least I should be good to go at this point." This makes sense (pending scientific review). The cost to self and others is already paid.

4) "I would not be afraid of getting sick so long as I had an early treatment plan" also makes sense in principle. It's an alternative to vaccination. Also pending scientific review; I have no idea who's right here.

4 is an absolutely terrible alternative to vaccination. It's like saying if the boat sinks I'm going to either swim or put on a life vest.

2 prior to vaccination was absolutely horrible nonsense. There was an expectation relatively early that we would have a vaccine within a few years and that it was absolutely possible to hold out and have only a fraction of the population would have to get it pre vaccine. If you hold position 2 the only logical way to proceed would be to take protective measures prior to vaccination, vaccinate, then get infected.

This is still suboptimal because the more the infections are spread out the lower the burden on the system for those who do get sick. The reason you don't see fully fleshed out though processes beyond I'm going to get sick and get it over with is that if they really thought it all the way through they would drop the entire position.

> 4 is an absolutely terrible alternative to vaccination. It's like saying if the boat sinks I'm going to either swim or put on a life vest.

I don't dismiss it prima facie like you do here. On one hand you probably have small but non-zero damage from the vaccines (putting aside the controversy of supposed significant damage). On the other, you supposedly have the ability to keep damage from the disease to also small (but non-zero) by early treatment. Plus, you get immunity to more proteins in the end. At least some studies out there indicate that infection-based immunity is stronger and/or longer lasting than vaccine-based.

But again, the reality of the situation may very well be as you imply. I just want to steelman their argument. I'm also rather skeptical of their claims about mitigating damage with early treatment, but maybe.

> 2 prior to vaccination was absolutely horrible nonsense.

I have mixed agreement here. As it pertains to careless massive spread of the thing, I'm with you.

As it pertains to individual choices, I really think it's a value judgment. Do you want to live life hidden away for this unknown period of time, the government apparently moving the goal posts over and over, etc etc? Or would you rather just take a risk in life like you always do, albeit a bit larger one than usual? Or maybe you're close to the end of life anyway, and you're willing to risk dying to see your grandkids one last time? etc etc.

I've always had zero judgment toward people who make this choice in as much as it affects only them. I was close to taking this route myself (in a controlled manner) winter 2020-2021 if the vaccines didn't come out. (On the other hand, I've had a lot of judgment toward people in as much as they affect others. It's been a tough couple years for me as a libertarian.)

> If you hold position 2 the only logical way to proceed would be to take protective measures prior to vaccination, vaccinate, then get infected.

This is more or less me, other than pulling back during hospital surges.

3 is actually poor as well.

Natural immunity doesn't involve a known infectious dose, and the virus actually has parts of its genome (ORF8) which antagonize MHC and the humoral immune system.

If you get very sick then its much better than vaccination because you gain T-cell epitopes to the whole genome and the response is very strong. But someone who just pops PCR positive and has little to no symptoms may not have seroconverted and form no immunity at all.

There's this very stupid idea that "natural is better" and that is false. A pile of the nonstructural proteins are all thought to be involved in immune suppression and are the exact opposite of anything that you'd ever want to put into a vaccine. The virus itself wants to be as stealthy as possible for as long as possible, for reasons that one would think would be entirely obvious. That makes it worse.

Hmm, then it sounds like getting infected before vaccination is more likely to be valuable than getting infected after, since you'd be less likely to be very sick after. And of course you don't want to get very sick.

I guess there's no free lunch here.

That's very difficult to know, but most studies of "superimmunity" were done on people who got sick and then got vaccinated, not the other way around (and those generally were patient contacts, so often more severe than symptoms that would normally be treated at home).

The only way to have a known, titrated response is to be vaccinated. And the vaccines actually are free, and the side effects are very low and they're safer than aspirin. And they're designed to bypass innate and intrinsic immunity and to stimulate humoral immunity -- where the natural virus has a gene that specifically tries to combat the host humoral immune response.

The fetish for natural immunity is ascientific. Every bit as much as something like Steve Jobs rejecting surgery for his cancer in favor of natural alternative treatments.

This would have to be my favourite xkcd regarding COVID.

https://xkcd.com/2300/

Hm, I'd have expected a better response under the 'xkcd' moniker, something more... logical. Something like...

             Say, I think I'll
    O  o --- take my chances
   /|\/|\    with this cough
   /\  /\
   ---------------------
             But why would you risk
    O  o --- being infected? You'll
   /|\/|\    feel miserable!
    /\ /\
   ---------------------
             I'd rather feel miserable
    O  o --- only once instead of
   /|\/|\    three-four times.
   /\  /\

The comic was pretty unfunny and ignorant. For most people, COVID never was a major threat, and getting infected and getting immunity was always a valid approach. Read the great Barrington declaration, signed by over 10,000 scientists and thoroughly attacked by people like Dr. Fauci without any science backing the attack. Also read all the studies on the matter, which almost universally conclude those with natural immunity fare better against re-infection than those with vaccine immunity alone.

Speaking as an unvaccinated with natural immunity, along with all my immediate family and friends in the same boat.

Edit: adjusted signature numbers for Barrington declaration.

I have natural immunity too. Got it by being vaccinated, instead of taking the much larger risk of being infected. Aside from the higher risk from the disease, there's the risk of infecting others. An infected person can infect others before symptoms appear, so having everyone with low risk get infected creates the possibility of infecting others of high risk, which of course defeats the whole purpose of the immunization effort.

That is referred to as "vaccine derived immunity", look it up. Drastically different from natural immunity.

>> I have natural immunity too. Got it by being vaccinated, instead of taking the much larger risk of being infected.

> That is referred to as "vaccine derived immunity", look it up. Drastically different from natural immunity.

Uh, what now? "Drastically different"? Are people who get vaccinated aliens with different kind of immune systems?

Natural immunity and vaccine derived immunity are quite similar, since they arise from the same mechanisms. IIRC, the main difference is vaccine derived immunity is more consistent and predictable (e.g. in a lot of cases natural immunity can be inferior).

They have different priors and according to CDC a prior exposure to Covid yields better protection than vaccine alone, and vaccine in addition to prior exposure does not yield statistical significant reduction in hazard ratio.

> They have different priors and according to CDC a prior exposure to Covid yields better protection than vaccine alone, and vaccine in addition to prior exposure does not yield statistical significant reduction in hazard ratio.

I wouldn't read too much into that:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-heal...

> The new study’s findings do make sense, said Christine Petersen, a University of Iowa epidemiologist. She said a vaccine developed against an earlier form of the coronavirus is likely to become less and less effective against newer, mutated versions....

> Another thing to consider: The “staunchly unvaccinated” aren’t likely to get tested and the study only included lab-confirmed cases, Wherry said....

> CDC officials noted other limitations. The study was done before the omicron variant took over and before many Americans received booster doses, which have been shown to dramatically amplify protection by raising levels of virus-fighting antibodies. The analysis also did not include information on the severity of past infections, or address the risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19.

> — 6-fold lower in California and 4.5-fold lower in New York in those who were vaccinated but not previously infected.

> — 29-fold lower in California and 15-fold lower in New York in those who had been infected but never vaccinated.

> — 32.5-fold lower in California and 20-fold lower in New York in those who had been infected and vaccinated.

So 29 fold lower rates in California for unvaccinated with prior infection, how much of that do you want to attribute to behavior vs actual immunity? Why is it so unbelievable that getting infected actually gives immunity?

Except when they are not similar, that is. This is more common than you seem to think, e.g. TBE - tick-borne encephalitis - is a nasty piece of work of a disease which can leave the victim with permanent disabilities (around 25%), dead (around 2.5% for the strain common here in Sweden, far higher for the strain endemic in Russia), cognitively impaired and more. I got it in 2005 (which made me the "index patient" for this part of the country, it had not been seen before in this area) and it was... unpleasant. Now that I had the disease I am immune for life. My wife and children got vaccinated to avoid my fate. The vaccination consists of three initial doses followed by a new dose every 3d to 5th year, depending on age (the older, the more frequent).

The current crop of SARS2 vaccines comes of far worse than the TBE vaccine with immunity waning in a period counted in weeks, not years [1,2,3]. Natural immunity is "from 6 to 27 times stronger" depending on which researcher you listen to. Here's part of the abstract of the largest study (~700.000 test subjects) on these matters:

SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

[2] https://www.westernjournal.com/johns-hopkins-doc-says-natura...

[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

Nope. That's vaccine immunity. Let's get our terms right.

Also, you can infect others presymptomatically with the vaccine. With omicron, it looks like asymptomatic transmission also occurs. Don't worry. I've researched this. You're not the first person in this world to try to make others feel guilty for not getting the vaccine. The problem is you don't have a ton of science backing your guilt trip.

You are arguing like a child who thinks she can define words to mean whatever she wants them to. But in reality, words are meant to communicate mutually agreed-upon ideas, and in our reality, these phrases have specific definitions: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/immunity-types.htm

That I have to spell this out suggests you are either lying to yourself or being disingenous. And the same applies to your argument about trying to make me feel "silly" but not "guilty". And your other arguments. They all seem to stem from self-deceit or insincerity, and suggest that I am wasting my time trying to communicate ideas with you.

Vaccine-induced immunity is against the particular spike protein of the first Covid variant. The protection offered by natural immunity is broader than that.

The only valid one here is:

- less personal risk

Community risk makes no sense, the vaccine has absolutely no impact on transmission. Disagree? Show me your sources

And no need for quarantine after infection if you've been vaccinated? Uh, you might just be irresponsible. Do you also refuse to wear a mask?

You're talking about getting infected after vaccination. I'm talking about vaccination vs infection as a path to immunity. You can also get infected after getting infected, so it's a wash there.

Just to make sure that no one reads this and believe in that "Great Barrington" claim, the numbers (as of today) are:

Total Signatures 920,477

Medical & Public Health Scientists 15,707

Medical practitioners 46,412

The rest fall under "concerned citizens" category.

The Great Barrington Declaration is complete garbage, and does not have a million scientists' signatures. Even if you go by the self-proclaimed numbers, slightly under a million "concerned citizens" signed it and 15,000 public health scientists signed it. The next question then is how they verified those 15,000 were scientists and the answer is they didn't. You checked a box when you signed it. So at best, they have 15000 people who would claim that they are scientist. Oh, btw, you didn't have to put your real name to sign it, so you have individuals with clearly fake names claiming to be scientists signing this thing and there still were only 15,000 signatures. Nope, do not base public health decisions on this dumpster fire of a petition.

If your only critique is that some of the signatures are fake, then you haven't exactly disproved the declaration as much as hurled insults at it. That's usually what people do when they don't have facts on their side.

When a large part of the argument for the position was that it was the reasoned words of qualified experts the fact that it is a complete lie full of signatures of imaginary people is even more destructive than one might imagine to its credibility because honest positions aren't normally advanced by lies.

If I produced a position that advanced the idea that water makes things wet and it was signed by Roger Rabbit and Porky Pig you wouldn't give it serious thought and assume that it pushing some untruth or other because generally the truth doesn't walk in clothed in a lie.

Positions unworthy of consideration don't need to be debunked because they have proven their lack of worth on their face. If you believe the ideas contained therein are worthy you ought to strip them of their association to obvious liars and present them bare to the world lest they be casually dismissed.

I assume you want people to take what you're saying seriously, we all do.

It would help if you were to mention why it is "a complete lie", how the positions therein are "unworthy of consideration", have "proven their lack of worth on their face", as well as which signatories are "imaginary people".

I am literally not saying that you are wrong.

I'm saying that making broad statements in the context "everyone knows...", without support, will lose anyone but those willing to endlessly argue with you in the same opinionated context. In other words, instead of a worthwhile discussion, this is the equivalent of standing behind barricades on one side of the street screaming at the people behind the barricades on their side of the street who are screaming at you. Despite well composed sentences above, it has no more value than graffiti. Why bother?

The Great Barrington declaration was a web form signed by such luminaries as 'Dr Johnny Fartpants', 'Professor Notaf Uckingclue', Dr Johnny Bananas”, “Professor Cominic Dummings” a resident at the “university of your mum” and another supposed specialist whose name was the first verse of the Macarena.

A web form with no verification step that tells people that they don't have to lock down is going to be seen by 10,000 weirdos on the internet for every one doctor or scientist. Not doing at least a first pass filter of removing obvious nonsense and counting doctors based on people checking a box robs them of all credibility.

Furthermore the notable authors who really are the primary minds behind it also pushed for an entire list of now discredited theories and flawed studies now known to be nonsense. Like claiming that we were nearly at the threshold for herd immunity back in 2020.

In retrospect their theories look even worse than they did at the time. Suggesting that we ought to let covid wash over half of us while the other half somehow stayed away from the first in October 2020 looks especially insane when vaccination began in December 2020. It's like being in an out of control truck hurtling towards the cliff with a fellow in the back yelling "jump jump you're going over anyway!" in retrospect with the perfect clarity provided by hindsight knowing that the truck will slow to a stop before hitting the cliff edge and going over that fellow looks either malicious or stupid.

Winter 2020 was bad but not bothering with precautionary measures would have meant many more would have faced covid without the better tools and vaccination to blunt the harm. Furthermore as deaths continued to rise as our health care system choked people would have eventually when deaths rose enough self imposed the isolation and economic consequences the declaration spoke out against being imposed from on high.

It's bad science, bad methodology, bad public policy, bad logic and bad faith. 'Professor Notaf Uckingclue' needs to go back to school.

I considered the great barrington declaration first and foremost based on its ideas, not based on its signatories. Similarly, I would take seriously the claim water is wet because it's actually true. I've also spent a good deal of time listening to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the co-creators of the declaration. I would that he had Dr. Fauci's job. Actually, he would probably be miserable because the job is about politics far more than it is about science.

> which almost universally conclude those with natural immunity fare better against re-infection than those with vaccine immunity alone

Almost as if the immune system... worked as intended. Shocking.

This begs the question, why not simply use immunity status instead of vaccination status? If someone has the right antibodies to fight COVID, does it matter how these were obtained?

I can present to you a very good reason not to use immunity status. Every idiot and their brother was discussing how they had already had it when statistically this was absolutely impossible. Everyone who had the sniffles from late 2019! to current is absolutely sure they have had it because it would be more convenient to be immune than not.

It would be impossible to give antibody tests to 60M antivaxxers in any reasonable time frame. Instead of asking people to wait in line a year for a test that has very little medical use the politically expedient thing would be to ask for the equivalent of a doctors note saying they pinky swear their patient had covid. Some states/some doctors would fire up the presses and within a month 95% of the antivaxxers there would have a certificate regardless of actual status.

Since vaccination is actually in everyone's interests even if they have already had covid this would lead to less people being vaccinated and it would be against even the anti vaxxers interests and furthermore locations that only allow vaccinated or tested people would now be equally full of infectious people as vulnerable people with a newly false sense of security.

> Some states/some doctors would fire up the presses and within a month 95% of the antivaxxers there would have a certificate regardless of actual status.

Then test them and fire the doctors who deciced to lie.

Other countries, notably Israel do allow it. Their scientific establishment is apparently a lot smarter than the one in the U.S. Or maybe less corrupt? We can only guess at the motivation behind apparent incompetence of these agencies, often referred to as "conspiracy theorizing".

This seems like a reasonable approach and it’s been talked about. Is there anything stopping individual states from issuing such certification?

> This begs the question, why not simply use immunity status instead of vaccination status? If someone has the right antibodies to fight COVID, does it matter how these were obtained?

Because humans love any opportunity to discriminate against another group of people. Despite this discrimination making zero sense, since clearly us vaccinated people are still spreading COVID at very high rates.

1. To err on safe side - better have 2 immunities than 1 (esp when it's self reported)

2. Unity - we're in this together and I'm sorry if you live in a place where communities are disconnected

We're in this together sounds a lot more like "You're in this with me."

Do you include Prof Cominic Dummings and Dr Johnny Bananas in your numbers? [1]

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-...

Attempting to refute the entire petition based on a few fake signatures is a similar argument used against the VAERS database.

"Hey it doesn't matter if there's 20,000 deaths, I found this one fake report! The entire system is thus suspicious and should be disregarded"

Luckily people see right through this weak argument.

OP thinks the claims hold more weight due to the number of signatures otherwise they wouldn’t have mentioned the numbers. Therefore it is perfectly valid to point out that the people on the list were not properly verified.

Not sure what your point about VAERS is.

I believe this is in reference to those who have breakthrough infections while already vaccinated, hence acting as a "booster".

Unvaccinated with an omicron infection is not necessarily the same thing, and isn't likely to have as strong an immune response.

“During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.” https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm

I’m not sure what you think you are saying. But vaccinated + previous infection is superior to either alone. Hence the “super” booster nomenclature.

> Instead of "super booster", you can just call it what it is: natural immunity.

No. A booster comes after vaccination (since it boosts the immunity acquired from the earlier doses), but the term "natural immunity" implies being unvaccinated (because pretty much only anti-vax people emphasize natural immunity, as part of their grab-bag of reasons to justify not getting vaccinated).

Immunity is a complicated word. It feels dichotomous in nature -- you're either immune or you're not -- but this betrays the underlying complexity of the molecular interactions of the immune system. Different variants my trigger, with some probability, recognition of some epitope which may or may not be conserved as the virus evolves.

The entire course of the infection and clearance plays out dynamically based on a multitude of factors ranging from initial viral load to immune activity and health. Depending on which cell populations are involved in the response, the response kinetics, and the degree of activation, they may proliferate this recognition for a long time or not.

It's messy.

Instead of reading a reporter from CBS with a limited education it might be better to read the work of scientists

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.13.22269243v...

> Limited cross-variant immunity after infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant without vaccination

Such natural immunity is both safer and more effectively obtained not as an alternative to the vaccine but in addition to it.

There is a real risk of either a second act for delta or a new variant either downstream from omicron but different enough or downstream from delta or both.

I no longer trust the applicability of sera studies. Publicized sera studies have not accurately forecast severe outcome statistics.

I agree, but it's also straight up an inaccurate statement. No one knows for sure if natural immunity from Omicron will protect from future variants. Given that having Delta does not make you immune to Omicron, I think it's straight up lying. My dear friend just had Delta in early December 2021 and got Omicron in early January 2022.

Immunity also wanes, and we have no idea if someone who had Omicron will even be immune to Omicron in 10-20 years.

What is natural immunity? Can it only be achieved by anti body response? Or also T-cell response?

This discovery and reporting will be suppress or downplay. We expect big pharma to give up the vaccine sales? We expect government to give up lockdown+controls? We expect our congress to be fiscal responsible and not going for round 2, 2T budget build abck America better sequel?

didn't you get a memo. "super booster" is a newspeak for "natural immunity" which is politically irresponsible now. /s

Love catching a virus so I don't catch a virus.

Sources are divided on the statistics, but catching Omnicron so you don't catch Delta would be a winning trade (not a big a win as catching one-time-use mRNA, haha, but we're talking strict economics.)

Fair, but you don't get to choose what you catch and it's extremely unlikely (like, < .001% in the US) that you'll catch Delta instead of Omicron.

I'd for sure choose Omicron, though.

I think the "Omnicron will protect us" statements are meant to be understood by comparison to a counterfactual world where there's only Delta.

The snark is unwarranted, because there's actually a huge benefit to reducing your ability to be infectious to the people around you.

It allows you to live your life without social distancing and without any risk to people you engage with.

But to do that you first have to become infectious, right? I'm no longer being snarky, I'm curious what I'm missing in the thought process.

Nobody, in this comment chain, made the claim that one should intentionally get infected (I don't think, unless I'm missing something implied).

It's inevitable that at least some portion of the population is going to be infected, intentional or not. We wouldn't exactly be in a pandemic otherwise. And it's certainly not some new found knowledge that coming into contact with germs/diseases leads to an immune response to better respond to future infection.

Instead of looking at it as "Why should I intentionally get infected to avoid being infected", maybe try looking at it through the lens of "I've already been infected, how does that change my risk analysis?".

I personally know people who's calculus on this is literally "I am going to catch covid explicitly so that I can build immunity to covid." These people are idiots. I probably was too hasty assuming everyone in the comment chain was of this mindset before giving them an chance to make whatever potentially rational case they planned on making.

I think they key point of any risk analysis should be that "I can spread Covid even if I'm unaware that I have it". We know that if you have caught Covid once, you can catch it again. We also know that while some people do gain some longer-term immunity to Covid, many don't. There's no way to practically tell if you have that immunity or not. So, based on the fact that you can assume that you'll catch Covid for a 2+ time at any time, and will spread it before you know you have it, the math points to trying to not catch it.

And with that, if you have not caught it once you should really really be trying to not catch it for all the same reasons.

This is assuming you care about reducing spread, of course. If you don't care about reducing spread I can't really debate with you because our moral frameworks are so far removed from one another that there's no sort of argument one can make that will sway the other.

Sure, so you become infectious and quarantine for 10 days (at a time you can test and control), and then don't have to worry about it in the future. Removes a burden going forward.

You can catch it more than once and you are contagious before you’d reasonably have the knowledge to test. Now you’ve spread it when you didn’t have to.

Wait..... The coming variations are unknown, and the current variant is known.

I thought the only game we were allowed to play was to prepare for the worst and hope for the best?

If those are still the rules, you DEFINITELY want to prepare for the worst by getting Omicron, the real weak attenuated live virus vaccine. You definitely don't want the vaccine whose one trick S-spike protein is functionally useless as of now.

"Natural immunity" is lining the pockets of gravediggers and coffin makers. Imagine if Pfizer's vaccine caused 7,000+ deaths every day.

Contracting the virus isn’t a safe way to gain immunity.

For healthy, already vaccinated people it's reasonably safe to contract omicron. I haven't gotten omicron (I don't think) but it's not at all something I would worry about at this point.

Concern is still warranted for high risk groups. It's important to vaccinate to reduce symptoms. It is safe for most people to contract omicron.

Modern medicine weights the benefit of a treatment against its side effects. Chemotherapy, as one example, absolutely ravages a person but the alternative (ongoing cancer) is significantly worse: that is why chemotherapy is a recommended treatment for cancer. The current consensus is that we shouldn't be intentionally infecting ourselves with COVID as an inoculation. The side effects of this treatment aren't well understood and we have evidence that they can be pretty bad (long COVID).

Remember that we are currently only counting deaths. You should continue to do everything in your power to avoid catching COVID... and vaccinate, obviously.

The death counts aren't even accurate: https://www.dailywire.com/news/jordan-peterson-absolutely-no.... And the evidence that long COVID is generally bad is lacking as well.

The virus has no doubt been bad for many groups of people, but when the leading cause of death in the U.S. for adults 45 and under is drug overdose from a single drug, fentanyl, and when the excess deaths over the pandemic from suicides far outstrips COVID deaths for teenagers, it's time to pause and reconsider health from a more holistic perspective. COVID kills the elderly and those with a few other comorbidities like obesity and diabetes, but, for many, the risk factor is too low to justify the outrage people have over the unvaccinated, as much as it is the fault of the media and the established government for stoking this outrage.

The outrage over the vaccinated is equally as high, case in point: I was talking about intentionally catching it.

So safe, in fact, that more people are dying in Puerto Rico this week, due to the omicron spike, than at any earlier point in the pandemic.

How many people out there do you think are making that decision?

In order for them to do so, they would have had to avoid being vaccinated and getting infected this whole time. There just aren't that many of these people left at this point.

There are however millions upon millions of people who have already gone through the ordeal of an infection and are tired of being harassed, badgered, shamed, attacked, etc, even after the talking heads are finally admitting that these people are not the plague rats they led everyone to believe they are.

Why not? I'm triple vaccinated with Pfizer, and I was seriously considering getting infected. I still don't see any data on hospitalization rate between getting infected with delta vs omicron variant for triple vaccinated people. At the same time getting infected with a variant would prepare my body for newer mutations.

depends on the age group, co-morbidities, and virus variant. Isn't it?

Pfizer will make a lot more money if you need Pavloxid to treat your COVID than it would have made from the vaccine.

Natural immunity is not an acceptable solution. Not for sars-cov-2 just the way it wasn't for Polio. With Polio ~70% of people infected were asymptomatic. ~29% had bad diarrhea and gastrointestinal discomfort. 0.5% had that and then were paralyzed for life. It's a pretty apples to apples comparison.

Natural immunity is the worst possible outcome and it leaves millions with their lives ruined. Omicron, even in vaccinated populations, is not in any sense good or even less bad.

Your comparing sar-cov-2 to polio? It's a horrible comparison. Polio strikes the young because it was endemic and older people already had Immunity. It doesn't kill but maims. The average paralytic polio case meant closer to 50 years of productive life lost, whereas the average COVID death represents maybe 10 years at most.

Polio has no animal reservoirs, only human reservoirs, therefore it is defeatable.

COVID has many animal reservoirs, therefore it is undefeatable.

It was also accepted fact that polio vaccines killed children. It is not yet accepted fact that COVID vaccines kill people. At least they were honest back then.

Natural immunity is not always natural immunity, depending on so many factors: the individual, expectations, infection variant, which disease... I appreciate when they are more exact with the wording.

What you meant to say is that natural immunity varies between individuals. Of course, the same is true with vaccine immunity. The CDC's propaganda campaign to convince people otherwise has about zero science backing it. What is also true is that just about every study published concludes the same thing: natural immunity works better than vaccine immunity alone in fighting off COVID re-infection.

When and where has the cdc claimed that vaccines are equally effective on everyone?

They haven't.

They have said everyone who can should get one because everyone who can should get one.

The CDC, along with the corporate media that works hand-in-hand with the democrat party in the U.S., have long been saying vaccine immunity is more consistent: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/21/fac...

"An April 20 paper awaiting peer review — and cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — found that people who had received two doses of shots from Pfizer or Moderna had antibody levels "up to 10 times" higher than those of a natural infection."

This science was complete garbage, partially because antibody levels are a poor signal for the strength of one's immunity even as admitted by the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/an...

More importantly, it was not a real-world study of how one form of immunity performs versus the other. This by the way, is not the first time the CDC cited or published study, reached conclusions they should never have responsibly reached, and then had their conclusions parroted by corporate media and leftwing fact checkers for months or even a year or more before being discredited. By that time, the damage had already been done.

Others doing studies around the same time comparing real-world immunity performance concluded the exact opposite: https://www.citizensjournal.us/johns-hopkins-medical-prof-ex....

"The study authors concluded that ‘individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.’ And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.”

Nowhere do you quote them making any such outlandish claim.

All this says is that it's effective.

From the article I linked: "Recovery from COVID results in very variable immunity to a second infection, and this is reflected in the wide range of anti-spike antibodies in recovered patients," McFadden said. "On the other hand, the immunity from the vaccines (especially the messenger RNA versions) is much more uniform, both in terms of protection from COVID and in anti-spike antibody levels."

He's not from the CDC, so here is another one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/01/what-works-...

"CDC finds immunity from vaccines is more consistent than from infection, but both last at least six months"

"Coronavirus infections can cause severe disease or no symptoms at all, and the CDC found that antibody levels vary widely from one individual to another after an infection. The report also notes that there is no test authorized by the Food and Drug Administration that would enable doctors and the public to reliably measure an individual’s protection from disease. And although higher levels of neutralizing antibodies generally signal higher protection, scientists don’t know precisely what level of antibodies will protect an individual."

Sorry to argue this, Covid vaccine debates are a shitshow i try to avoid now, and will try to avoid until 2025. But i think on this particular point, you're wrong, unless i misunderstood you:

Are you saying that the CDC lied because they said explicitly that the vaccine was more consistent than natural immunity? I'm not sure if natural immunity is consistent, i've read (not on scientific papers sadly) that a first asymptomatic infection from the first strains (until Omicron basically) can leave you without antibodies at all.

But unless you are immunodepressed, vaccine do leave you with antibodies and B and T cells, consistently:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25167-5

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3891065

(immunodepressed-specific): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X2...

I also have a non peer-reviewed paper from an French ARS, but its not translated and they do have a tendency to remove them, making the link point to nothing.

Now, i've also read that Omicron might leave you with antibody more consistently than older strains. It was recent (likely two weeks ago) and i did not research that at all, because doing my own research (and i mean reading papers, checking authors...) take too much time for me right now.

To be clear: i do think that the mRNA vaccine will be proven be less effective against new strains than good old prophylactic vaccines, and i'm against forcing afraid people to take an mRNA shot (that i also believe to be extremely safe) when prophylactic vaccines are this close to be available. I won't die on this hill though. But you seem to be quite cross with a declaration that i'm pretty sure is true, or was until Omicron. You should assume good faith first.

Sorry to sound cross. I believe I explained my point already, but I'll try to re-iterate in a different way.

The CDC measured antibodies and found more variability with natural immunity, then concluded vaccine immunity is more consistent. This is either a huge scientific mistake or just plain dishonest, as antibody level measurement is not shown to be an accurate way to measure immunity. I provided a link to the FDA saying the exact same thing. The CDC then used this erroneous conclusion as part of their big push that everyone has to get vaccinated. To re-emphasize: there is more to your body's defenses than serum antibodies and you can have zero such antibodies and still be protected: https://www.clinicbarcelona.org/en/news/can-you-be-protected....

In contrast, real-world studies like the Cleveland clinic study came out around the same time and showed that natural immunity is working better in practice with no significant variability, but the CDC just ignored those studies entirely even though they were much higher quality than the ones the CDC were citing.

Finally, when a democrat-run administration speaks, or when someone friendly to that administration from the deep state speaks, the corporate media spend about zero effort researching, questioning, or fact-checking it because they are essentially all allies working together. They instead just blindly repeat the message and weaponize it against dissenters. This, combined with the CDC's many mistakes and/or agenda-driven dishonesty, has resulted in great harm and misinformation in American society and possibly the world at large.

If the CDC had not done these things, there may not have been a vaccine mandate from President Biden that had to be shut down at the supreme court level. There may not be as much of the segregation, discrimination, and vitriol that's going on now. These things matter, and the CDC has very clearly acted as an agency with an agenda and not in the best interests of the people: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/02/01/rep_thoma...!

Note that I'm not talking about immunosuppressed people here. I have done zero research on that group but I assume they are a very tiny part of the population that needs to make special considerations for their health, not just for COVID, but for all diseases.

> natural immunity works better than vaccine immunity alone in fighting off COVID re-infection.

By "natural immunity", you mean, "getting infected"?

No, I mean, the immunity achieved after fighting off infection, which includes antibodies in the blood stream for a period of time, and, as far as we can tell, long-lasting, probably permanent, T- and B-cell memory.

And post-infection immunity is achieved not just by production of s-protein antibodies, but antibodies to proteins of the membrane, the nucleocapsid, and the envelope of the virus.

Well, if you get vaccinated, and it fails, then I guess you get natural immunity as a consolation prize!

What, and "super booster" qualifies as exact wording here?

You are right. Those who got "natural immunity" from Delta had no protection from Omicron. But how Omicron is structured, they get natural immunity from Delta and many other variants.

https://youtu.be/PYLbJ0H8zdc

It always felt a bit off to use the label "natural immunity" for a virus that many (especially whose who use this label) believe to have originated in a lab.