Re:New Covid variant BA.2 detected in at least 40 different ...
by orblivion on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:44PM
(#30089864)
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.
Re:New Covid variant BA.2 detected in at least 40 different ...
by lamontcg on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:59PM
(#30090095)
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.
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.