Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime | Hacker News Reader

Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

nature.com

264 pointsazth412 comments

From my understanding if you had an mRNA vaccine, your body was only exposed to an artificial spike protein, so effectively you have spike specific antibodies.

On the other hand, if you had a real infection by the virus, you likely have antibodies for the spike protein and other part of the virus like the shell. So from my layman understanding, the immunity should be more resistant to a mutation of the spike protein.

That being said I also know someone who got Covid 2 times, once in march 2020 and once in april 2021. (Confirmed by PCR the 2 times). The second time was much milder, but still she had to stop working for a week (versus one month the first time). It is still possible it was a defective test the second time, and something else than Covid.

If she was out for a month and then again for a week, it sounds like a compromised immune system more than anything else, assuming she isn't elderly.

What if you have the vaccine, and then get exposed to the actual virus? Would it be the best of all worlds as the existing antibodies would prevent a full on infection but your body would also learn more generalized attacks against the virus? Or would it not be enough exposure to warrant the latter?

That’s what I think and is why I actually wanted to get the virus 2+ weeks after vaccination.

You want to get the virus so that in the future you don't...get the virus?

1. You could control the timing and your circumstances so you can quarantine etc, as opposed to having it unplanned, maybe while traveling

2. Supposedly symptoms and forward-transmission will be milder/less right after a vaccination as opposed to months later.

Yeah:

1. Be super healthy 2. Have full vaccine effectiveness 3. Relatively quarantined

Now you’re gonna have the strongest defense. In the future you won’t unexpectedly get it and have any chance of infecting people around you. You chose when to get it. Smart all around, but very counterculture.

It makes sense if people who have recovered from Covid and are presumed immune are exempt from lockdown measures.

By coincidence, my uncle got the covid nearly at the same time he got his Pfizer shot. Later, the symptoms became too serious. It seems that the vaccine didn't have enough time to protect him. He went to the hospital where he discovered he got the covid. He was under oxygen for weeks. Luckily, he recovered, but lost so much weight and now feels very weak. This is just one example, I don't know whether it would be different or similar in general. Nevertheless, it is still a reason to think that maybe it is not a good idea.

I'll admit to not understanding why, but "consensus" seems to be that the vaccine confers greater resistance to variants than does natural immunity- perhaps the natural immunity is over-fit to the one virus, whereas the spike is a necessary component to the whole family?

That said, I've also seen oft repeated that what you get is immunity*, aka resistance to the worst symptoms. Mild infections are still to be expected as possible, and Covid 19 will join the ranks of common-cold causing organisms.

My impression was rather it's consensus that the vaccine provides more predictable immunity, which is the most important thing if you want to set policy. So recommendation in most countries I checked is to get the vaccine, even if you had Covid, cause it's the same dose for each patient and we have much better data on efficacy, whereas immunity from infection is much less predictable and traceable.

I thought it was sort of the other way around; that your immune system is keying into some fairly random and subjective set of dna features on the specific viral strain you've been infected with.

But that with the mRNA vaccines, your body is being explicitly taught about the spike protein, nothing more, nothing less. So provided any future infection employs a spike protein, you have immunity. The question is, what are the odds that sars-cov2 would evolve an entirely different mechanism from the spike protein? My impression was that's pretty unlikely, and why there's so much confidence the mRNA vaccines are robust against variants.

I know absolutely nothing about this subject and frankly am unqualified to even participate in this discussion. I'm just hoping someone who is can clarify/correct my understanding if it's totally misinformed.

Its unlikely to evolve an infection mechanism besides the spike protein. There will be plenty of mutant evolutionary deadends that live and die in a few days.

Based on work from similar coronaviruses, the spike protein was quickly identified at the beginning of the pandemic as an important component for viral binding to the ACE-2 receptor. It is one protein component of the viral shell, but has proven to be an excellent target, given its induced immune response to the mRNA vaccines.

Covid will not be able to mutate away from using the spike protein, but it will continue to evolve mutations within the protein as it responds to selective pressure. Fortunately, when the body creates an adaptive immune response through antibody or the T-cell receptor, this response is polyclonal. Think of it as not a single antibody to spike but rather a population of antibodies, all targeting a variety of residues on the protein. This is why most immunologists are not terribly worried about the variants that have emerged wrecking all of our immunization efforts—those variants are usually based on just a couple of mutant residues and so will not (generally speaking) be able to evade the population of antibody and t-cell responses that have been generated. You may have heard about monoclonal antibody therapies to covid ... those, unfortunately, are very susceptible to mutation because if a critical targeted residue mutates, you could lose all efficacy of the drug.

The only answer to rapidly mutating pathogens is an entire inducible population of neutralizing proteins in each of us and it’s no coincidence that we have this defense. If we didn’t, our species could not be here right now.

> You may have heard about monoclonal antibody therapies to covid ... those, unfortunately, are very susceptible to mutation because if a critical targeted residue mutates, you could lose all efficacy of the drug.

Depends if the therapy works on the virus itself, or your body's response to the infection.

I think most of the monoclonal antibodies are working on your body's (over)response, so mutations shouldn't change much. Same with corticosteroids.

But Nucloside/tide analogues on the other hand or anything else working against viral processes/replication, oh yeah.

I should have been more clear about the monoclonals I was referring to, which are those targeting the virus itself (1).

You may be thinking of the targeted immune modulators against inflammatory cytokines like TNF-alpha (2) and IL-6 (3). Some of those are antibodies, others are pieces of antibody fused to other proteins. Regardless, those types of treatments would not be affected directly by viral mutation, whereas the first type I described above have already been shown to be less effective with existing mutations (4).

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casirivimab/imdevimab 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casirivimab/imdevimab 3. https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/immunomodulat... 4. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/850

> So from my layman understanding, the immunity should be more resistant to a mutation of the spike protein.

This is probably not true. But I don't know of any medical evidence one way or the other.

First, your innate immune system could clear the virus, at which point you have no immunity at all.

Second, your immune system could lock to some random piece of the virus that easily mutates.

Third, your immune system could lock on to some random piece that is common. Oops. Autoimmune problem incoming.

Fourth, your immune system could lock to some piece of the spike protein that mutates quickly (apparently the immune system "likes" 3 particular regions around the spike protein --one of which mutates quite freely).

With the vaccine, your immune system is primed to the spike protein and the particular region that is expressed in the vaccine. It's very targeted.

I had Covid, but I went and got the vaccine anyway for exactly these reasons.

Seems like it is the other way, at least according to his paper[1]:

> Previously infected individuals developed higher Ab titers to the vaccine than those who have not been previously exposed. These results indicate that mRNA vaccination rapidly induces a much stronger and broader Ab response than SARS-CoV-2 infection.

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.15.440089v4

The fact that previously infected people have higher titers to the vaccine implies nothing about the effectiveness of the vaccine -- it implies that the human immune system works, and recognizes the spike protein when it is re-introduced. Extrapolating from this to conclude that the protection is therefore better is an unsupported leap. The authors are trying to piggyback on previous work that claims that antibody levels correlate with immunity, but there's a huge difference between someone who has never had Covid, and someone who has.

The abstract does say that vaccinated people have higher titers than naturally immune people, and this can be considered evidence:

> mRNA vaccination induced much higher Ab levels especially against the RBD domain and significant cross-reactivity against SARS RBD and S1 was also observed.

That paper demonstrates that the vaccine provides a stronger response to the part of the virus that the vaccine tries to get you to respond to than actually getting sick does.

It does NOT demonstrate that the vaccine provides any response to other parts of the virus. And it almost certainly does not, while getting sick does.

It also DOESN'T address the question of which provides a better response to novel variants of COVID-19.

Some time ago i listened to a respected Argentina scientist (that lives and works in France) saying something: “we can’t confirm nor deny anything about COVID, given the poor quality of scientific procedure we follow in testing”

He was complaining of lack of scientific rigorousity with testing (at least in France) and he compared it to the “behind the scenes” of a restaurant’s kitchen.

For example, he was saying that the “informal” rate of contamination of tests were off the charts, but surprisingly, nobody was doing a thorough, official contamination analysis.

What I’m saying with all this is that: your friend thinks she had COVID twice. Or even, her doctor thinks so. But it’s hard to trust anything with our given situation.

PS: I’m not saying she didn’t have it twice. It might be possible. It just sucks how bad we’ve been at science these past 2 years and how easily we’ve been overwhelmed by “operative” tasks.

Edit: his name is Pablo Goldschmidt[0] and he works in France (not in the UK as I originally stated). Here's the interview (in spanish, also WARNING, the site sucks and is full of ads): https://marcelolongobardi.cienradios.com/pablo-goldschmidt-l...

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pablo-Goldschmidt

This is also why you never want your DNA to end up where it can be used for false accusations against you. Lab work isn't trustworthy against mistakes.

Paranoid a bit much?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you!

Elon Musk got himself tested 4 times the same day in 2020. 2 positive 2 negative.

That's not surprising or particularly notable for a rapid antigen test, which is why they're not used as a full replacement for a PCR test in most countries.

The BD rapid test he used seems to be one which a paper [1] indicates has a lower positive percent agreement than a PCR test.

Rapid tests in general, compared directly to PCR, seem to do even worse with one paper [2] finding a symptomatic sensitivity of 72% and an asymptomatic sensitivity of 58%.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33023911/

[2]: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

And a reminder that he did in fact have covid. A funny tweet that explains the trade offs of that kind of test: https://www.newsweek.com/space-karen-response-elon-musk-vira...

I was

Day 0: Antigen positive Day 1: PCR positive Day 8: Antigen positive Day 9: Antigen negative Day 10: Antigen positive Day 10: PCR negative Day 11: Antigen negative Then 10+ negatives after

>So from my layman understanding, the immunity should be more resistant to a mutation of the spike protein.

There have been several studies that suggest vaccination provides stronger immunity to mutations. Here's one titled 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

Did any of these studies compare people who were vaccinated with people who had COVID19 at the same time relative to sampling? In this paper the two groups are separated in time, making it very hard to interpret the results. The effect could simply be due to difference in antibody titer at different times from infection.

>It is still possible it was a defective test the second time, and something else than Covid.

Now that the whole world has gone banana over a virus outbreak, it's really important to look at and understand how these tests work. Just because she tested positive does not mean she was really sick with covid, nor does it mean that the test was defective if we assume she didn't have it. It's not an on/off thing, it depends on how exactly they test and how the results are interpreted.

You can see from the figures released by various governments on testing rates vs cases that the false positive rate on tests is very low (< 1%, probably less than 0.2%). There have also been a few documented cases of catching it twice, so this is very rare but possible. So either cause is possible in this case, and the tests are really quite reliable as tests go.

>You can see from the figures released by various governments on testing rates vs cases that the false positive rate on tests is very low

This sounds like circular logic, or I'm misunderstanding what you mean. How were these "cases" confirmed? By testing? It would help if you cited the figures where the reliability of the tests can easily be seen.

Btw, my point was exactly that the issue isn't with the test itself but the interpretation thereof. Most people do not understand how they work and so they don't understand that even healthy people can test positive depending on the criteria we use to define "positive". But positive doesn't mean sick and it doesn't necessarily mean infectious either. By itself it doesn't mean anything.

To take one example the uk gov reports testing around 1 million a day for an extended period with only 2-3k positive and there is no strong correlation between testing rates and cases. That indicates a very low false positive rate - a significant false positive rate would give a higher baseline and a stronger correlation.

Of course there is strong correlation between testing rates and cases. If you don't test clinically you can't know you have them. Tanzania for the longest time didn't do any testing at all and as a result officially had 0 cases.

You've not supplied any data supporting your false positive hypothesis.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Your evidence is contradicting your opinion!

Yes, that's what "that being said" means. It introduces something that contradicts that which was previously stated.

> Confirmed by PCR

What was the cycle threshold? The problem with this whole manufactured pandemic is that all the numbers and tests are bullshit because people are doing bad science. The massive relief bills introduced financial incentives to do bad science. It’s institutional failure at a massive scale.

Positive tests, hospitalisations and deaths are highly correlated. How could that be if the test are bullshit?

What do you mean by “highly” correlated? Source?

Do a google for “COVID PCR ct cycle threshold” and you’ll come across loads and loads of good articles about how the meaning of a positive PCR test is relative to the cycle threshold.

Basically any country in this list: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Or one from only Belgium with hospital admissions and posivety rate to correct for the amount of tests taken: https://epistat.wiv-isp.be/covid/covid-19.html

Hospital admissions and deaths follow positive tests like clockwork.

Sure it's possible to fuck up pcr tests if you're doing them badly, but there are no indications that that is happening at a significant scale.

How do you account for huge jumps in excess mortality across multiple countries? What about the antibody tests? Lateral flow tests? Genetic sequencing? 10% - 20% of positive tests in the UK are sequenced - wouldn’t you raise concerns if all the samples you were sequencing were false positives?

Is it all a conspiracy? Without a single whistleblower? To what end?

Yes, it's all a conspiracy. The whistleblowers will come. Hopefully before the aliens reveal themselves due to the UFO disclosures. /s

What a strawman. Nobody is saying that COVID doesn't exist. Nobody is saying that people haven't died from COVID. Nobody is saying that excess mortality cannot be attributed to COVID. Are you making a good faith effort to understand what I'm saying? Have you done the google search I referenced above?

The presence of the virus (colonization) is much different than being infected by the virus. There's such a thing as viral load.

The phrase “manufactured pandemic” fits with all the conspiracy talk I have seen. Help me understand how I can interpret this differently.

I should also add this, from here [1]:

> Clinical specimens for sequencing should have an RT-PCR Ct value ≤28.

The sequencing you're referring to does not happen on the samples that I'm suggesting are false positives -- at least, it doesn't happen in the US. The CDC does not want those samples.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/downloads/Information-...

> That being said I also know someone who got Covid 2 times, once in march 2020 and once in april 2021. (Confirmed by PCR the 2 times). The second time was much milder, but still she had to stop working for a week (versus one month the first time). It is still possible it was a defective test the second time, and something else than Covid.

For what it's worth my girlfriend is currently recovering from her second bout of covid. She had it first about a year ago and then second about a month and a half ago. Confirmed by PCR test and antibody tests afterwards as well as totally consistent symptoms. The first time knocked her out totally about a week and left her tired for a few weeks while the second time knocked her out totally for maybe 2 1/2 weeks and she's still quite weak now 6 weeks later, so the second case has been much worse.

Obviously just anecdotal, but getting it twice does happen and the second time apparently can be worse.

My hypothesis is that people who got Covid once and recovered feel safe, thus start doing more risky things and have more exposure to potential Covid carriers.

So the second time the viral load may be much higher, which leads to worse symptoms.

Do you think this is true in your anecdotal experience?

In general that's certainly possible, but I don't think it is in this case. My girlfriend and I were pretty relaxed late last summer (a couple months after she got sick) to early winter when we had low case count, but after that we became very careful again when the cases got high. Since then we've both been very careful.

Her job has just been a bit of a cesspool of cases. It just keeps going around and around and eventually it got her too.

Another possibility is different variant which is deadlier. However everything is just speculation at this point.

Doesn't the virus bud off of the host cell's lipid membrane and not have a protein / capsid membrane for the immune system to be able to fingerprint? The spikes are the only thing visible to the immune system is my understanding, at least of viable virus.

Other innate immune processes destroy any extracellular RNA if the virus is ruptured etc.

Does anybody have any ideas as to what this means for people who've had COVID and then get vaccinated with one of the mRNA vaccines?

If not, is anyone studying this?

Probably that the vaccine is somewhat irrelevant: though that's up for grabs since what your body targets vs. what the vaccine targets will be subtly different.

I'm more interested that this means that quite likely, COVID-19 will be eradicated: with not many advantageous mutation pathways, and if vaccines are conferring immunity forever, it's pretty much going to be burned out of the population one way or the other.

>with not many advantageous mutation pathways

I was under the impression that any mutations to the spike proteins would make the current vaccines useless and would require changes to the vaccines just like the flu shot . Isn't this the case ?

It is the case, but with natural immunity slowly building up it will probably become more like a normal cold that you get as soon as a few variants have been seen by the world's immune systems.

>I was under the impression that any mutations to the spike proteins would make the current vaccines useless and would require changes to the vaccines just like the flu shot . Isn't this the case ?

No, it is not the case.

You don't just make one antibody that targets the entire spike that would be thrown off by a mutation.

>Human Antibodies Target Many Parts of Coronavirus Spike Protein

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/05/18/human-antibodies-ta...

So far, all the claims that a variant (London variant, South African variant, Indian variant) would be immune to the current vaccine have turned out to be unwarranted.

By saying it will quite likely be eradicated, you’re assuming herd_immunity_threshold% vaccination is achieved, aren’t you?

There are countries that are yet to achieve even 1% and some populations are likely to never achieve the threshold for immunity in that population.

He is saying herd immunity will be achieved before the virus has a chance to mutate and escape it (it's quite unambiguous here). The GP's comment says nothing explicitly about time frame, but sounds pessimistic on that.

It won't be. Look at vaccines in the US, the have flattened out at around 50%. Many countries are <30%. And there are animal reservoirs. This is not like polio.

Probably nothing at all, the mRNA vaccine will just prompt the body to make even more antibodies against the variants from the vaccine.

I expect having stronger flu-like side-effects on the first injection instead of the usual second mRNA injection. For this reason, if you had diagnosed COVID, in France you'll be injected a single dose of mRNA vaccine and be considered immune.

I had COVID at the end of December. I just got my first Pfizer dose yesterday. Almost no side effects, just a bit of sensitivity around the jab site. And a very slight chill feeling for a few hours.

I think you might be referring to those social media posts that suggest that the mRNA vaccines undo the immunity afforded by an infection. Those stories are false, here's more information: https://factcheck.afp.com/american-red-cross-accepts-plasma-...

Yes i am studying this and have data on covid + post covid quarterly antibody markets followed by one dose pfizer and monthly markers.

In a nutshell - covid patients have sustained antibodies, non covid with vaccine groups have faster decay from Peak concentration.

There's some evidence that a second dose of mRNA vaccine isn't necessary if you were infected with Covid.

>People who have already had confirmed covid-19 might only need a single dose of a mRNA vaccine, two small studies have indicated.

Two weeks after a single dose of vaccine, people who had previously had covid-19 had antibody concentrations that were as high, or up to 10 times higher, than the levels seen in uninfected people who had received two doses of the vaccine.

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n308

This HN user [0] has an anecdote to challenge this evidence.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27315459

How does that challenge this evidence?

This is important when vaccine supplies are limited (in some places in the world that's the case), but not if they aren't.

"Since then, one study after another has reinforced the single-vaccine-for-survivors idea, though some skeptics have pointed out that it is logistically simpler to just give everyone two doses than to figure out who needs only one...Cheng at Cedars-Sinai said she would still default to the CDC guidance calling for two vaccines, even for people who have had COVID-19. The data does suggest, however, that one dose could be enough"

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/04/18/world/coronavir...

I think supply is not the only thing to consider. I suffered a SARS-CoV-2 infection around Easter, and received my first vaccine dose a week ago.

The days after that I felt much worse that when I had the actual infection, albeit for a shorter time, so I personally would appreciate an official recommendation to not have to take the second dose.

There was a similar, or same study published by Nature I saw here a few weeks ago.

I would have happily skipped the second Pfizer shot if the CDC said it was ok.

At the end of the article.

> Ellebedy’s team has observed early signs that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine should trigger the production of the same cells. But the persistence of antibody production, whether elicited by vaccination or infection, does not ensure long-lasting immunity to COVID-19. The ability of some emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants to blunt the protective effects of antibodies means that additional immunizations may be needed to restore levels, says Ellebedy. “My presumption is we will need a booster.”

The idea seems to be that an infection is like a single dose of the vaccine, so you still need another shot for the best immunity.

Also see the discussion from three days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27267852

I am being shunned by my family because of my lack of interest in the vaccine. I've had COVID and recovered. I also don't get a flu shot each year. I really like not putting things into my body, especially when year after year I may or may not "catch" these things but if I do, I always recover. I act responsibly and do not go out when I am sick.

However, none of these facts or articles such as this will ever effectively challenge the "get the vaccine or you are a bad citizen and will kill everyone" emotional arguments that are out there.

I have continuously been near or around folks that have come down with Covid and have yet to encounter a second infection or positive test since my initial infection. I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

I think you are in for a long wait.

Who said after recovery you need vaccine? Probably you just need to share official documentation from your government and official health body with your family. Afaik, recovered and vaccinated are treated the same currently.

I asked about this. The response I got was that many people who got COVID had a mild case where the immune system did not kick in very strongly. That these are more likely to get a 2nd infection. The vaccine for them will give them coverage from a second infection.

They want everyone to get the vaccine so that people aren't missed who had a mild case.

Right or wrong, this is the reasoning being shared where I live.

> They want everyone to get the vaccine so that people aren't missed who had a mild case.

i feel like "mild case" (also) subtly refers to all of the folks who said "oh, yeah, i had a cold in december 2019, that was probably covid. i've had it. no big deal."

And a study just released has also contradicted this “assigned opinion” being weaponized by the vaccine virtue signalers.

Thanks for sharing!

>"But the persistence of antibody production, whether elicited by vaccination or infection, does not ensure long-lasting immunity to COVID-19. The ability of some emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants to blunt the protective effects of antibodies means that additional immunizations may be needed to restore levels, says Ellebedy. “My presumption is we will need a booster.”

The article talks about how the experts on this field "presume" we'll need boosters to get antibody levels high enough to combat the worse mutated variants, and of course, it could be a bit of an arms race between it mutating variants that are better against our antibodies, and us boosting our antibodies with vaccines to trigger responses and keep blood levels high.

After recovery you need a single shot instead of 2.

The broadly-accepted imperative requirement is "vaccinated", as in "do not enter without a mask/etc unless you have been fully vaccinated". There is never a reference to "inoculated" (to wit vaccinated or had Covid and recovered).

Furthermore, there may not be "official documentation from your gov't and official health body". I was tested & 'treated', but my wife had exactly the same symptoms & recovery without bothering with doctors (seriously, it was really mild), so there is no documentation and no apparent process to procure such documentation.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Seems that, to most people, Covid & vaccines are magic: the disease is perceived little differently from evil spirits (sparing some and slaying others, with nothing corporeal to perceive & avoid), and the vaccine is a tangible talisman mysteriously able to ward off such spirits (by a mere prick from a costumed wizard wielding magic potions). This leaves most people, unable to really grasp the objective mechanism of vaccination (being a simulation of actual infection, to teach the body to fight it off), with the only objectively perceivable act they can grasp in the issue: vaccine injection. Hence many dismiss the near-spiritual notion of "I contracted it, survived, and am now immune - without intervention by wizards". Thus, to present it a bit over-the-top, recovered and vaccinated are not treated the same by those not professionally involved in medicine.

> The broadly-accepted imperative requirement is "vaccinated", as in "do not enter without a mask/etc unless you have been fully vaccinated". There is never a reference to "inoculated" (to wit vaccinated or had Covid and recovered).

As can be concluded from my post: Where I live vaccinated and recovered are treated the same, at least for now.

> Furthermore, there may not be "official documentation from your gov't and official health body".

Where I live there are laws what is permitted in super markets, restaurants, bars etc. And there are recommendations from the official health body that is responsible for the Covid topic. Often they overlap, sometimes they don't. But I think currently both agree on the vaccinated vs recovered point.

All that is said just to sync up on facts. I'm not trying to convince anybody of changing their interpretation or opinion.

> Probably you just need to share official documentation from your government and official health body with your family.

That's going to be tough[1]:

> Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html

But you _did_ catch covid so being careful isn't always enough. I don't think it's emotional or unreasonable for your family to require the vaccine before you visit.

Also, I'm not suggesting that you will "kill everyone" by not getting the vaccine, but it really isn't just about you and that you personally will probably recover.

Do you think it's a reasonable thing for most people to take your stance and not get vaccinated? We are at the tail end of this thing _because_ we have a vaccination available.

The thing that I find so wrong about this type of argument is that the vaccine is not proven to prevent spreading the virus. It is only proven to stop the onset of COVID-19 after one contracts the virus.

So the line of reasoning that argues one should get vaccinated to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is not valid.

Edit: Wow - the downvotes... There is some evidence that transmission is reduced, but it is not proven:

"the risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in fully vaccinated people cannot be completely eliminated"

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

I'm not sure why people keep saying this. The original studies did not study if the vaccine prevents spread, that is true. I'm not certain myself, but I believe that studies done based on COVID spread in countries where vaccination rates are high (at least Israel) point to the direction that it prevents spread as well. Are these not valid data points?

There was also the Seychelles data point which had the highest vaccinated rate and then had a large outbreak after.

Which vaccine did they use? The CDC says the strongest evidence for preventing spread is for the mRNA vaccines.

The vaccine produced by China's Sinopharm company:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sinopharm+seychelles&t=fpas&ia=web

Not entirely accurate. From the top article in your search:

"Among the vaccinated population that has had two doses, 57 percent was given Sinopharm, while 43 percent was given AstraZeneca."

The outbreak was mostly in unvaccinated people, and there was no background of prior infections (they never had a first wave).

Besides, studies on healthcare workers, who are tested regularly, showed a clear reduction in transmission.

I thought I read that it was proven to significantly reduce the likelihood of infection as well as completely eliminate the risk of hospitalization if you do get infected. Admittedly, the media coverage was abysmal (everyone was just quoting “90% effective” without clarifying “effective at what?”).

Not proven, but looking increasingly likely. From your own link to the CDC, "A growing body of evidence indicates that people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) are less likely to have asymptomatic infection or to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others."

I suspect people have a question in their minds for months ("Will the upcoming vaccines prevent a vaccinated person from carrying and spreading the virus?"), and whatever is the first credible reply to that question, they cement it in their understanding ("you may still spread covid if you're vaccinated").

Now we have far more real world data and it appears that even if a vaccinated person is carrying an asymptomatic infection that they shed very little virus. This is not a certainty, but things are leaning that way.

But people can't replace the old "fact" they knew with the new "fact".

Vaccinate the high risk people then.

This doesn't work because non-vaccinated people will breed variants, which the original vaccine won't work on.

Sounds like boosters are needed regardless. High risk people get boosters, problem solved.

Sure but in the interim, high risk people die. Your argument is essentially "I would rather not get a vaccine, even in the face of some high risk people dying". My argument is "I would rather everyone (within reason) get a vaccine, even in the face of some people not liking it".

That is clearly not logically consistent. I also know that the following will be very bothersome to hear for many people and I hope to . Nothing would indicate that unvaccinated would lead to mutations, especially over vaccinated whose vaccination does not actually perform as well as natural immunity developed from the body naturally building immunity.

What is actually bing discussed in the non-corporate medical community and research is starting to validate the very well understood theory that relatively poorly performing vaccines are actually going to lead to mutations if they haven't already. It is the same concept that has led to "antibiotic resistant bacteria" when antibiotics are either overused or not used as long as they should be, leaving the most resistant bacteria to reproduce.

I realize it must be difficult to accept such a contradiction to what people are told by the corporate media and corporate medical industrial complex. It also requires accepting and acknowledging that may have been injected with an untested/risky novel experimental medial compound for no good reason, but that it will likely also lead to even worse variants that will require ever more vaccines that are ever less tested and will increase risks of adverse reactions with every single event.

No matter what, we have clearly cast the die and things have clearly been fundamentally shifted in ways that are clearly carry unknown outcomes. THAT should really worry people, even if we all survive this particular event, scathing by relatively unharmed. What happens when the next virus comes around that may actually be as dangerous as we were scared about and some or maybe all of the next rushed vaccines trigger antibody-dependent enhancement or some other mortal effect that kills millions with no way to prevent it.

We ARE playing with fire here. No matter how we look at it. Someone, possibly many, will be get burned at some point probably far sooner than one would think.

I am away from my home in the state of Nebraska now because my mother-in-law was one of the small number of people to experience a highly adverse event from her second Pfizer shot.

She went into cardiac arrest 3 hours after getting her shot. It's been over a week now and they will be taking her off life support shortly because she is now brain dead. It should be noted that this is a rare event and I do recommend to my loved ones especially my father and her to get vaccinated.

That being said no media organizations are going to report what happened to my mother-in-law. They know if they do so it will create vaccine hesitancy in many people. I understand and empathize with this but it does raise ethical questions.

The corporate media are perfectly happy to stay silent on this because they no longer view their role as informing the public, but rather as getting the public to do what they think is right.

They are happy to report on statistically improbable events as long as they are part of their overall political narrative. For every person that reflexively responds to me that what happened to my mother-in-law is a rare event, the same people won't hesitate to talk about the George Floyd murder as if it's a typical occurrence in police interactions with black men. The data shows this to be not true at all but they don't care because their narrative is all they care about.

My point is that this vaccine technology is definitely new and it's probably going to be revolutionary and saving tremendous numbers of lives especially in Africa with malaria. However because it's so new there are going to be bad things happening from it as well and folks who deny this are making problems worse.

What happened to my mother-in-law is now being used as fuel by various people my family who are Alex Jones followers. The reaction from the medical establishment and the complete lack of coverage in the media has further added ammunition to this idiot in my family. Suppressing information always creates a backlash every time.

Is this written up anywhere public, preprint, VAERS, etc?

When I was visiting her yesterday afternoon, the attending physician confirmed with us that her case had been reported to the VAERS system.

That sounds awful and you have my condolences.

With respect to the media: > That being said no media organizations are going to report what happened to my mother-in-law. They know if they do so it will create vaccine hesitancy in many people. I understand and empathize with this but it does raise ethical questions.

There are plenty of news organizations who would publicize this story. There have been major outlets reporting on all manner of vaccine complications as they have been rolled out.[1][2][3]

I would encourage you to reach out to the CDC directly if you feel the medical team is not taking it seriously.

[1]: https://www.foxnews.com/health/cdc-guidance-heart-inflammati... [2]: https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2021/05/04/cdc-investigating-mi... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/health/covid-vaccine-deat...

Thank you.

The medical team did confirm with us yesterday that they have reported it to VAERS.

The irony with all of this is rich. The entire point of the vaccine was to prevent her from acquiring an infection that would potentially put her on a ventilator in an ICU forcing us to say goodbye to her as she suffocated.

We are now going to be turning off the ventilator, removing the tube, and saying goodbye to her as she suffocates. At least she is brain dead which she would not be if she was dying of covid-19. That's the only blessing we can think of.

> Nothing would indicate that unvaccinated would lead to mutations

It's actually how viruses work [1].

[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-does-it-mean-that-th...

Can you provide some evidence that this happened now, or for earlier diseases?

Manaus in Brazil doesn't count, FTR. It never ever reached herd immunity: the data was a large overestimation.

I think my evidence is that there are variants. Isn't the way variants work:

- A human gets infected

- The human becomes a virus factory

- While producing gazillions of viruses, mutations occur

- Mutations are variants

The most prolific by far variant factories are apparently immunocompromised individuals, including those vaccinated - which harbor infection for months and a weak immune system - which lets the virus optimize against weak humans, in the same way the traditional vaccines lets the immune system optimize against a weak virus.

(From memory, don’t have a link handy)

Yeah I mean, we're (presumably) both doing some armchair virology, but I buy that if you're immunocompromised that you can't fight off the virus, and thus the virus succeeds in turning you into a virus factory until you die.

That said, I don't think that's an argument against non-immunocompromised people getting vaccinated. It's like me saying "don't touch the toaster if it were just on, you'll get burned" and you responding "yeah but ovens really burn you." OK well, be careful around both I guess.

It is a great argument that non-immunocompromised people should get vaccinated. If non-immunocompromised people are vaccinated, the probability that immunocompromised people get infected gets smaller, thus causing less variants.

Some people cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

Many high risk ppl cant get vaccinated, because they are, well, high risk.

This comment avoids the facts noted in the linked article, which seem to point to perpetual immunity of anyone who was infected by SARS-CoV-2 in the past.

It's strange how the same people who scream "TRUST THE SCIENCE" the loudest seem to ignore your body naturally producing antibodies to Covid after you've been infected and recovered.

You simply don't need a vaccine to help your body produce antibodies if you already have them. Not just for covid 19 but for anything.

Don't let anyone shame you or pressure you into getting a vaccine that you're not comfortable getting.

What's your area of expertise regarding antibodies?

I'm quite happy admitting that I do not know anything other than the basics and trust in experts in their respective fields instead.

It's literally in OP's linked article. Did you come here to comment without even clicking the link?

I don't trust anyone without running a skeptical eye over their claims. Blind faith in authority is authoritarianism manifest.

>It's strange how the same people who scream "TRUST THE SCIENCE" the loudest seem to ignore your body naturally producing antibodies to Covid after you've been infected and recovered.

It's not strange at all. Human beings have probably been doing this since not too long after languages developed:

Do 'X' because 'Y', since 'Y' is in agreement with my opinion and personal interests of you doing 'X'.

'Y' may be science, religion, math, emotion, whatever. The point is that many people will push information they want pushed with and later contradict themselves if need be as long as they can consistently push the information they want. The arguments and rationale are usually secondary, not the primary driver.

Politicians do this a lot. It's lying in the form of intellectual dishonesty or sheer ignorance. Many highly religious people push firm accordance with their religion or their interpretation of their religion, while allowing their own desires to shape those ground rules: they pick and choose which rules to follow literally and which to interpret, and so on.

There are a lot of people out peddling things in the name of science but they don't understand science: evidence, process, uncertainty, etc. When it comes to COVID we've learned a lot but there's still a lot of uncertainty around a lot of aspects in various studies and we need to understand that with humility and act accordingly.

You must have read a different article than I did. It just talked about the production of antibodies. They help fight off infection but don't necessarily make you immune. The article also specifically mentions vulnerability to variants.

Isn't that how vaccines works?

My understanding is the antibodies created from the vaccine are not the same antibodies that maybe created from having one of the main strains of the virus and thus would not offer the same level of protection.

> “They help fight off infection…”

Yeah, that’s what the immune system does.

Providing partial immunity, not necessarily full immunity.

There are multiple documented cases where a person caught COVID twice (where the two instances were genetically different, and therefore not a false positive caused by lingering dead virus).

The linked article only indicates that antibody production should continue for a long time, but that's only one factor in robust long-term immunity. The rate of antibody production and the set of proteins that the antibodies target are also very important.

It's good news to be sure, but it doesn't yet prove what you seem to want it to.

>There are multiple documented cases where a person caught COVID twice

There have been far more breakthrough cases of fully vaccinated people than there have been confirmed reinfections.

> There have been far more breakthrough cases of fully vaccinated people than there have been confirmed reinfections.

Yeah, but there are vastly more vaccinated people than people have been confirmed infected even once, so that doesn’t really tell you anything. (Currently, the number of vaccination doses being delivered per day globally is about 1/5 the total number of confirmed global COVID cases.)

Thats a good point.

We'd need to compare the number of confirmed reinfections divided by confirmed infections with the number of breakthrough cases divided by the number of fully vaccinated people.

Its also worth noting the confirmed reinfection count is on a much longer time scale than breakthrough infections. So we currently have more data about the long term natural immunity than we do for vaccinated immunity.

Of those cases, I’ve seen zero reported as symptomatic. If you have any proof otherwise please link sources.

I don't see the relevance of whether the re-infection cases are symptomatic. If anything, this makes it slightly more important to be careful, because asymptomatic transmission is what makes this virus worse than others of similar lethality. I don't think that's a significant factor, though.

The person you are responding to is not *most people". They had the virus and they recovered.

The vaccine is intended to create immunity in people who don't already have it because they haven't already caught the virus.

This really isn't complicated.

The vaccines are effective against the spike protein, which is what makes SARS-CoV-2 so virulent. In reality, there are many ways skin that cat, and there's no guarantee that the body chose the spike protein. From the article:

> most of these participants still had memory B cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2

No matter how you slice it, you are playing 'Rona Roulette if you don't get vaccinated.

The CDC also recommends getting vaccinated despite any prior infection, and there has been anecdotes of post-acute COVID-19 syndrome being alleviated with a vaccination.

The root comment is special pleading.

If the body cleared the virus, then what it chose is effective whether that’s the spike or the nucleocapsid.

It is actually more likely to be robust than vaccine induced immunity.

The claims about superiority of vaccine induced immunity that I’ve seen all rely on antibody counts, and in the very short term that may very well be true - but the importance of T-cells is not sufficiently well characterized to say it with certainty.

> If the body cleared the virus, then what it chose is effective whether that’s the spike or the nucleocapsid. It is actually more likely to be robust than vaccine induced immunity.

Where’s the research showing there is more effective immunity possible than the spike protein method of the vaccine?

... which hinges completely on the virus not evolving at all, which is outside of the realm of reality.

Evolving a new spike is extremely disadvantageous for the virus.

Widespread natural immunity is not enough to prevent a repeat of this this or next year, especially when we have evolutionary hotbeds in countries which could not (or would not) do anything to prevent the spread.

> Evolving a new spike is extremely disadvantageous for the virus.

... Right up until almost everyone has an immune response to the spike and not to any other feature, at which point a virus which changes the spike and potentially keeps its other features is a winner. We are creating an immune monoculture.

> ... which hinges completely on the virus not evolving at all, which is outside of the realm of reality.

This makes no sense.

If you only only target the spike, you assume the spike doesn't change sufficiently. If you target the entire virus, you assume the entire virus doesn't change sufficiently. As far as I know, mutations are generally assumed to be random. You're effectively matching against a shorter string (spike only), so you're less likely to recognize a mutated virus, than if you match against a longer string (the entire virus) which is what natural immunity targets.

Mutations in the spike (that still keep it effective - and we actually have quite a few of these already) are much more likely to evade the vaccine-induced immunity than they are likely to evade natural immunity.

Mutations only in the nucleocapsid are more likely to evade natural immunity than vaccine-induced immunity, but to a lesser degree - because natural immunity also targets the spike.

> Do you think it's a reasonable thing for most people to take your stance and not get vaccinated?

As with any other disease, it is reasonable (and expected) for everyone who had covid to not get vaccinated, given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine.

That this is even considered controversial by some people just goes to show you how far our science education has failed us.

>given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine

This is false. Stop spreading misinformation.

Stop spreading misinformation. My comment was not false, and in fact is quite obvious. e.g. from https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdch/Waiver_Ed_Natural_Im...

"It is true that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines."

The only argument that document takes about it actually being better is that with some vaccines you need two shots instead of one. That's not compelling as being "better" at all. "Better" would imply that, once the complete course of vaccination is complete, the immunity is somehow more complete, stronger, or longer lasting.

Quite often what is "obvious" isn't true. Take some time and do some reading on this topic and you'll find that vaccines can provide equal or better immunity than a natural infection.

Your comment was indeed false, and many many studies have been done to compare natural vs vaccine immunity. Vaccination with a highly effective vaccine, e.g. Moderna or Phizer/BNT yield higher antibody response, and are more protective against variants in study after study.

You don't have the authority to decide what is misinformation and what isn't.

If you disagree with it counter it with your own facts but you are not the speech police.

Who are the speech police and who has the authority?

> the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine.

My understanding is that the opposite is true, at least based on what we know right now. Here is an article summarizing just that[1], which links to a few peer-reviewed studies (and a couple that are pending review) suggesting that the vaccines are better than natural immunity.

I don't have any background in this or agenda or anything, so don't shoot the messenger - just sharing what I understand to be the opinion of at least some of the medical community.

> "Vaccines are highly efficacious," Fauci concluded. "They are better than the traditional response you get from natural infection."

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-why-covid-vaccines-wor...

I would want something a bit more than studies by the vaccine maker about how good their vaccine is -- for example having those studies reproduced by a third party and comparing natural immunity to the vaccine -- before concluding that a vaccine can be better than natural immunity. It is almost always the case that natural immunity is superior to vaccines.

> It is almost always the case that natural immunity is superior to vaccines.

Do you have a source for that claim? GP offered peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary, which you don't believe, but so far you've offered no evidence at all.

The linked article doesn't support either view.

The link reports that vaccines have been observed to generate higher antibody-levels than natural infections. It was also observed that vaccines seem to protect against a set of variants. This is the good news that is worth reporting.

But there are observed occurences of the opposite; that vaccinated people test negative for antibodies. Similarly, people test negative for antibodies some time after recovering. Sometimes, recovered people never test positive for antibodies.

Diagnostic tools widely available are simply not good enough to test the immune response.

> given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine

That sort of claim really requires evidence. "Obvious" statements aren't science.

I’m not an expert by any means, just trying to reason this out logically.

I don’t know too much about COVID, so I’ll use Flu as an example.

Let’s say your statement is true. You get antibodies for the specific strain of Flu that you caught and the response was greater than vaccine. Flu vaccines include multiple strains. So even if your premise was true, you should get the vaccine to protect against other strains right? Unless you are advocating for catching every strain of Flu?

"As with any other disease, it is reasonable (and expected) for everyone who had covid to not get vaccinated, given that the immunity you get from having the disease is always better than what you'd get from a vaccine."

This is actively untrue.

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4813740/ vs. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29029053/ for a non-COVID example.

>We are at the tail end of this thing _because_ we have a vaccination available.

Are you implying naturally gained immunity does not play a role in herd immunity? Is there any data which supports this hypothesis?

No he is not

Brazil. Sweden. Seasonal flu. HIV.

Human immunity is not the sole factor in herd immunity.

For hard-core irrefutable evidence, get your IgG antibodies assay test done. Problem solved, you're a model citizen now.

> I act responsibly and do not go out when I am sick.

How many days before you are noticeably sick can you spread the flu or COVID?

Research seems to indicate 2-3 days, if you even have symptoms. If you don't have symptoms until you fight it off.

Until now, virologists had little evidence on whether having covid gives you lasting immunity or not. It seems possible that you're not giving your family enough credit.

The reason that not going out when you're sick is an insufficient precaution for covid is that people spread the virus for several days before they get symptoms.

I agree with you, and would also point out the subtitle on the article says: "though viral variants could dampen some of the protection they offer".

Variants are the problem here, which is the case for all anti-vax arguments.

>I act responsibly and do not go out when I am sick.

With the flu for instance, you are communicable before you show symptoms. Were you wearing a mask for the duration of the flu season prior to covid? That would be what responsible looks like if you're not interested in getting a shot.

>I have continuously been near or around folks that have come down with Covid and have yet to encounter a second infection or positive test since my initial infection.

I'm not sure you can say that with 100% certainty unless you've been getting weekly tests since your initial positive results. Early studies indicate that people who get re-infected are more likely to show no symptoms the second time around, but they can still infect others.

https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/12/can-someone...

The critical is infecting at what rate and for the flue how communicable. You cannot define responsible without quantified chances.

The article you have given is written by people that haven't given a single probability number. But they declare that it is unsafe. Declaring un/safety without measuring risk is senseless.

"get the vaccine or you are a bad citizen and will kill everyone"

Yep. Notice how the "follow science" phrase isn't used anymore. It's now just a demand to comply, or else you're a horrible person.

And it's especially ironic given that most of the shaming is coming from the 'my body my choice' proponents on other issues.

If you are referring to a pro-choice stance, I don't think that's really comparable to a situation where your choice can severely affect not only yourself but all people around you.

But many would argue that there is damage to society from that, too.

I'm in a pretty weird position right now myself.

I caught it in mid-February with mild symptoms basically just loss of smell. I have very high antibodies and my physician actually recommended that I hold off on getting the vaccine.

Unfortunately, I have several co-workers who refuse to attend a picnic if I'm there. All of them are vaccinated which indicates to me that there is no logic and simply a demand that I adhere to the same religion they do.

Because honestly it's sure feels like a religion with these people.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Yeah, Covid vaccination has achieved religious fervor among many.

For understanding people's responses to this, I think it's best to think of it as a war. The human race is under attack, millions of us have died, and we are hurting emotionally. During this time, we've had politicians actively say we should just give up and let the enemy kill 10x as many people, and enough people have followed these politicians' views to effect the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands in the US.

This may not be your view, but it is the view of many, that we are under attack, and people's lives are at stake. A ton of people have lost loved ones. Or they've had loved ones at deaths door and on oxygen and suffering for weeks.

So while you view those vaccinated folks who don't want to be around unvaccinated people as having a "religion," it may be just that they view you as a traitor to humanity. Back during the Iraq war, I didn't support us starting it, and for that position many people treated me far far worse than simply not wanting to be at a company picnic with them. The people who treated me poorly for my views often had family who were in the military, and didn't want to think that they were putting their lives at risk for nothing. It wasn't even that the US itself was at risk, it's that they wanted their family to be risking their lives for a cause everyone supported. So when people have been fighting against a local enemy that is hurting us all, I'm surprised the reaction is so mild as to not want to be at the same picnic.

> I have very high antibodies and my physician actually recommended that I hold off on getting the vaccine.

what was their reasoning?

His reasoning was that I was more likely to get moderate side effects from the vaccine due to high antibody levels. He also noted that I shrugged off the initial infection and that it was highly unlikely for me to get infected again and in the event I did I would almost certainly have very moderate symptoms.

He did this contingent on the fact that I don't live near any elderly relatives nor do I socialize with anyone that is high risk. I don't socialize much at all really unless I'm outdoors.

I almost forgot to mention that he had looked at literature which stated that high antibody levels at time of vaccine could reduce its efficacy.

Frankly a lot of this is moving target so I'm keeping my mind open.

Why don't you just get it?

Just get the J&J so you’re officially vaccinated and only have to deal with side effects 1 time. Tbh it’s just a good thing to do for your community at this time.

Although I fully agree that they should have a pass for people who already got it and have high antibody titers.

> I have continuously been near or around folks that have come down with Covid and have yet to encounter a second infection or positive test since my initial infection. I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

People can get covid twice [1]. Especially older people who are at higher risk of death.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00502-w

In a year and a half, Veratti, a football player for PSG, got it 3 times. Reinfection is a real tangible thing.

Arguments against your case:

* Outlets had previously been reporting that mild cases do not give enough immune response to be lasting

* Variants might not be caught by the natural immune response, but the vaccines are showing to be pretty effective with them.

* Many people also think it's selfish not to get the free flu vaccines each year, so it isn't surprising that after a pandemic where half a million Americans died due to the spread of this disease, "No I'm good" seems callous. Surprise, you live in a society - and I don't say that sentence ironically.

Yes, science and reality is important. That's why the fact that the vaccine is a sure shot vs. you winging it with your prior illness, despite the fact the vaccines are overwhelmingly safe, gives some people pause.

> Surprise, you live in a society - and I don't say that sentence ironically.

You should. Majority of Muricans is not even willing to pay into a communal health insurance. So much for the level of society.

> That's why the fact that the vaccine is a sure shot

That take is not scientific at all. There have been several issues reported with the vaccines.

Here you are, trying to say that Covid is less of a threat to yourself and others than the vaccine.

Very few reactions have occurred. If you're worried about it, also don't go outside, cross a street, or go swimming in any body of water.

We still don't have enough data on whether this will suffer ADE. If parent is young, isn't in a highly infectious area and behaves cautiously, they may be making a less risky decision.

We absolutely have enough data to rule out meaningful ADE. Study after study (the phase 3 trials and all the ongoing surveillance) indicates a massive reduction in the rate of severe infection among vaccine recipients.

Sure, one can quibble about whether maybe some of the very small number of people who got a vaccine more than a couple weeks before a severe COVID case had a form of ADE, but that’s like saying that we haven’t ruled out that seatbelts might kill people. In both cases, the risk that a protective measure harms the recipient is massively outweighed by the degree to which the protective measure protects the recipient.

ADE doesn't really show up until years later with different strains and different virus.

By that standard, you also can’t rule out disease-induced ADE, dengue style.

But the vaccine developers do know what they’re doing. IIRC, with SARS, a lot of research was done that suggested that antibodies against N might cause ADE but antibodies against S would not. If that carries over to COVID, then maybe one is better off with a vaccine than natural disease: the latter induces antibodies against N but the former does not.

Covid infection produced antibodies can also cause ADE, so that's not a great argument against immunization.

Things are being put into your body with or without your knowledge. You had no idea if you were infectious with COVID for up to 14 days possibly, so it doesn’t matter if you didn’t go out when you “felt sick.” You may feel like your being responsible, but that does not mean you feeling that way actually means you are being that way.

Over 500,000 people have died. Awesome. You recovered. A lot of other people didn’t. I wouldn’t be so confident you’ll always recover. And it’s possible that you’ll infect folks who can’t recover along the way, because of your “lack of interest.”

Like I said, emotional arguments.

Nothing the parent poster said is an emotional argument - quite the opposite. It may be that you have an emotional response to those facts but that does not make it an emotional argument.

Sarcasm is expressing emotion.

Not really fact based affirming you “always recover”. Besides, I know people who got COVID twice or more.

Yeah, but you did get it. I'm not particularly careful myself, but I obey our local laws, wear a mask when required, etc. and I haven't caught it but I'm still getting my vaccination on Monday.

It's also baffling to me that you say you act responsible and two paragraphs later admit to being around people who have had COVID!

To me, it's completely irresponsible to not get a vaccine if offered but I'm not going to hold it against you and I can at least understand where you are coming from.

There are cases of even young, healthy people getting severe complications from COVID. This is not "just the flu".

People talked about 'saving granny' to get you to comply with Covid restrictions but now there's literally granny's dying in India and we're giving the vaccine to perfectly healthy people in America and no one gives it a second thought!

Meanwhile, under 55 age group has a fatality chance of Covid that is less than dying in a car accident and will develop immunity after natural infection. And the under 55 age group makes up over 80% of the population.

I completely agree about fact based realities needing to take hold again!

I think we may be in a post-truth society and all that matters to people is what's the news media report instead of actual science and statistics.

The upside to people getting their reality from the media is that when the news media quits reporting on an issue it will be COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN ABOUT, much like darfur, metoo, blm, starving children, dead innocent civilians in the middle east. Poof it will just vanish in the wind as long as the politicians don't make it actionable.

So just hold out for a bit longer and the news media will stop reporting on Covid and switch to a new topic that people can be outraged over.

And no one will care at all about your vaccine.

What about the fact that a VERY small sacrifice on your part of getting a vaccine plays a VERY small part in preventing an older or compromised person from getting VERY sick?

> we're giving the vaccine to perfectly healthy people in America and no one gives it a second thought!

You always give vaccines to healthy people.

>> And no one will care at all about your vaccine.

I'm quite confident you'll get a vaccine when you need proof to go on your week's vacation to some beach country, or any similar personal impact.

>> You always give vaccines to healthy people.

Directly from your previous sentence: "preventing an older or compromised person from getting VERY sick" (disengenuous of you)

>>I'm quite confident you'll get a vaccine....

Don't be. This will all but forgotten in a few months. :)

If there was still a shortage of vaccines I'd totally agree with you, they should go to someone who doesn't already have immunity. But that's not the case, so I do think you have a responsibility.

From an administrative standpoint, it's much easier to confirm that everyone has had the vaccine. And, there's some evidence that the vaccine provides better immunity than the virus itself.

IMO, this is even more true for the flu vaccine! Flu vaccines are less effective on an individual level, so as a society we're more reliant on collective immunity to slow down the spread. Lots of people die from the flu, and a little shot each year can help keep them alive!

Did you ever consider that you might have been the vector that Covid traveled through to infect all those folks around you that came down with Covid? When you draw out the network graph of Covid transmission, how many people do you think your specific infection affected downstream?

I'm not going to say you have to get vaccinated against anything, but I do see it in a lot of ways like a game of tug-of-war with society vs disease. Sure, its not essential that _everyone_ be pulling on the rope but it sure makes it a lot easier if they are. And things get really bad if more and more people stop pulling on it, especially if the other side starts getting stronger.

In Switzerland the government does not want people who have had covid within the last six months to get the vaccination.

Additionally if you do want to get the vaccination after 6 month they only want you to get 1 shot not 2.

Does the US not differentiate between those who have had it and those that didn't?

>Does the US not differentiate between those who have had it and those that didn't?

No they do not. Public messaging has completely ignored natural immunity.

>> I act responsibly and do not go out when I am sick.

a. you caught covid, so does your approach work?

b. you are often ill and contagious before you have any symptoms so unless you never go out this isn't sufficient

c. you get vaccinated and a flu shot for the holistic group, i.e. society. When individuals talk about personal rights and the "me" I question if they get this.

>> I have continuously been near or around folks that have come down with Covid and have yet to encounter a second infection or positive test since my initial infection. I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

OK, here's one: your casual anecdote is not a factual reality.

I get a flu shot to protect others and to protect myself. I was very clearly exposed to the H1N1 pandemic flu a few weeks after getting the vaccine, and, to the extent I got sick at all, I had minimal symptoms. I can’t know the extent to which my vaccine protected me or protected people around me, but, on expectation, it certainly provided a considerable amount of protection to me and others.

(For all that the H1N1 pandemic flu was minor compared to COVID, it still put a lot of people in the hospital. I’m quite glad I didn’t get a severe case.)

> have yet to encounter a second infection or positive test since my initial infection

Science generally saves us from trusting anecdotes, though. I know two people who were reinfected within five months, but I wouldn't conclude it's likely.

This position is selfish.

Covid is very often asymptomatic but still spreads. There is no way you can know that you haven't had it again, haven't spread it to others, and won't continue to do so without a vaccine.

And while it may be asymptomatic for you, you can still spread it to others who it will be very symptomatic for - including others who have been diligent and have taken the vaccine. You can kill people without knowing it.

The longer people go unvaccinated, the more likely mutations are to catch on, which may defeat the vaccine.

You are placing your general dislike of "putting things into my body" above all of our safety and welfare, and you are interfering with our collective efforts to end this pandemic and move on for the sake of our health and economy.

Please don't be so selfish.

I wanted to write this comment, but you said it better.

The OP's post is entirely about themself, evidenced in that it is written in a completely self-centered way. "I am experiencing social shaming and being shunned for a position I take where I show absolutely no concern for others. And yet they don't subscribe to my superior reasoning powers. My feelings are so hurt!"

Cry us a river, dude.

Asymptotic transmission has been proven to be negligible and non-issue.

There's actually still a fair number of people who get their first COVID-19 infection and never develop any symptoms at all, although it's a lot less than the initial research indicated early on in the pandemic: https://jammi.utpjournals.press/doi/10.3138/jammi-2020-0030

But a much bigger problem is presymptomatic transmission, which is why this disease was able to spread so steadily. Aside from that, there are people with symptoms that are so minor they never even consider themselves sick (although hopefully today people are more vigilant about this).

If they get the vaccine they can still be infected with covid and transmit to others. Yes they will be less severe and probably less transmissive but it's a bit dangerous to think a vaccinated person is that much better than an unvaccinated person.

False. Studies clearly show vaccinated is indeed “that much better” for preventing transmission.

Why come on here and post straight falsehoods that take 5-10 mins to google?

Repeat infections of covid have been confirmed and now that the CDC is tracking variants, we know that the dominant strains shift very rapidly. Meaning that you could be exposed to a mutated version for which your immunity is blunted or completely absent.

The vaccines are only 85-99% effective. So your family is still at risk for getting and spreading the infection. And if you're the spreader, it's possible that it would be a resistant strain.

My attitude mirrors that of your family. And it has more to do with doing ones part to combat this pandemic and return to normal. I got a vaccine less for my own person safety, but more for the good of society. I want people to be safe, feel safe, and I want front line workers -- who've given so much -- to finally get a break.

You're not willing to make this same, minor sacrifice for society that everyone else did. It makes sense that you'd be shunned by people who want this to be over with.

Man am I ever sick of this attitude. That high ground you’re looking down on other people from certainly has an extremely weak foundation based on what we know currently.

Consider a little respect and humility. You might be wrong. Many of the the loudest voices throughout this whole covid affair are currently muffled as they can’t eat and talk at the same time, lest they choke on their massive servings of humble pie for being so wrong about something they were so certain about.

Ok, I agree your family might be overreacting, and that it isn't a "big deal" you're not getting the vaccine.

But you really should get the vaccine, at least if you're in a place with abundant supply. There's just no good argument against it. The odds of "putting things in your body" having any effect on you are far less than the odds of getting Covid again, even if those odds are low. And mine as well make your family happy.

> The odds of "putting things in your body" having any effect on you are far less than the odds of getting Covid again, even if those odds are low.

Regardless on one’s position, this is simply baseless bullshit. Please don’t spread it.

If you are healthy, getting vaccinated against covid is not something you do for you, it's something you do for others. That's how vaccine works, when enough people are vaccinated, the epidemic stops. Some viruses evolves and for those a vaccine is required regularly (like flu, maybe covid). I can totally understand that you are not worried for yourself (I feel the same) but don't be surprised that people are unhappy that you don't care about them.

And you say you don't go out when you get sick, but I'm not sure how you would do that for covid, since covid can in many cases be asymptomatic.

I'm not sure how it works in your country, but here people that already had covid only get one vaccine shot, as the covid infection is counted as the first one.

It’s amazing that people don’t understand this.

If you have a condition or something that it could affect, sure don’t get the vaccine. I’m fine with that. But if you’re healthy and esp if you didn’t have covid yet, getting the shot is patriotic. Fools try to twist it otherwise.

FWIW, several non-vaccinated acquaintances of mine in different countries have gotten COVID for the 2nd time, though anecdotally somewhat less severe in the second round.

Is any data, yet, available about how reduced the contagiousness is for getting infected for the 2nd time naturally, vs. having the vaccine? For both catching and spreading it?

The main issue is that there is a very ill-defined wall between vaccines from science and a political agenda.

The average human (except maybe the elderly?) does not have the same problems with flu season and vaccination in the same way we view covid. Granted, covid is a big problem, but the mortality rate is about 10% [0]. The main difference here is that the flu season is mostly dictated by science, there are no public restrictions and people go about their lives mostly without consequence. Covid is a different beast for a bunch of reasons, and one major one is politics.

I have never up until this point in my life saw the amount of political pressure that everyone needs to be vaccinated. Probably going more off opinion that fact at this point, but I can't foresee any place in the world going back to normal once n% of people get vaccinated. At least the mayo clinic doesn't seem certain on what the long term effects of the current vaccines will be [1], specifically around "A COVID-19 vaccine might...Prevent you from getting COVID-19 or from becoming seriously ill or dying due to COVID-19." The CDC website seems to have more confident information, but I'm not convinced that we actually have the long-term data yet to back that up, but I'm open to being corrected with any studies that last more than 2 months, and use saline for control groups (and not another vaccine, which seems to be the popular method, which I'm also interested in opinions on). So _if_ the vaccines don't provided long term protection from being sick AND spreading the disease, don't expect vaccinated percentages to change the state of the current lockdowns.

I've been told I'm a bad citizen for just waiting for data that proves that shooting this vaccine in my body will actually support a good long term solution.

[0] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

It is absolutely okay to not get vaccinated! And if your family shuns you for that then you should question your family and the quality of their relationship to you. Especially because everybody who is afraid of Covid can get vaccinated ... so, then they are reasonbly protected. If they are afraid and not vaccinated then they can ask you to not seek physical proximity. I mean that's fine - but that's not shunning.

Also you do not have any resonsibility to do that for society. The society we live in is not even close to the level of solidarity and empathy to demand anything from an individual beyond respecting the law and paying taxes.

They might be shunning you due to your non-fact based opinions and consequent risky behavior: * I've had COVID and recovered * also don't get a flu shot each year * have continuously been near or around folks that have come down with Covid

And you think your family are the ones with the emotional arguments (!) Sorry this happened to you, but you're the one in the wrong here.

I'm not going to shame you for this but I think you have some misconceptions about the vaccines vs naturally acquired immunity that might impact your decision.

Naturally acquired immunity from the original strain of covid-19 is not effective against some of the other variants. The strain currently ravaging India has infected many individuals who had been sick before, sometimes extremely seriously.

The mRNA vaccines don't work the same way as old school vaccines. They're better technology and they're also much more effective than natural immunity. Basically by getting the vaccine you won't get seriously ill and you won't die. You're also less likely to get infected with the strains.

Nobody can force you to get a shot but you're helping protect yourself and other people by getting it. I hope you reconsider.

> I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

Sounds like you ought to start with yourself, to be frank.

If recovered people have longer term protection than vaccinated people (which is one possible interpretation of the headline's statement), would it make sense to first vaccinate someone and then expose them to the real virus, thereby generating the benefits with a much much lower risk or maybe even zero risk?

I don’t know anything about how effective that might be, but I imagine the logistics of transporting a live, deadly virus would be a nightmare.

In many locations you have hospitals close by with covid stations. So you could bring the people to the virus.

And that would work how, exactly?

Walk the people through the respiratory ICU ward without PPE? Not endorsing it, just brainstorming...

For me, this would be a point where I would fully rely on the experts for deciding how to implement that step and check if the plan is feasible. I don't recommend executing such ideas without syncing with authorities and experts.

That shouldn't stop us from brain storming, though, and allow experts to decide, if it's an interesting idea or stupid.

Wouldnt this just create the environment for a more resistant virus in a shorter period of time?

I did not calculated the chances yet but here is what my probability intuition is saying

Having 50% of population go through virus in one year creates a less fit environment for a more resistant mutation than having 50% of population being exposed to virus in 2-3 months.

Like more encounters over a shorter period of time is a good environment to allow survival of resistant mutations.

That will probably happen naturally. People tend to alter their behavior a lot after getting vaccinated.

I mean this seems like a great way to create vaccine resistant variants... but it's inevitable I guess.

Why? Make the patient catch Covid… so that they don’t later catch Covid?

Well, if vaccination does not protect you for a lifetime, but only for a year or so, and a survived infection protects you for a lifetime, then getting infected while vaccinated should get you the +lifetime bonus.

And you will infect a lot fewer people, maybe zero, for the rest of your life, too. Should also help with avoiding future pandemics from this virus.

It almost seems like a lot of people don't want the data to indicate that natural immunity is strong and long lasting, even though the data shows that reinfection is extemely rare.

Similar to how so many people have been unwilling to even consider a lab leak was a possibility, until just now it seems, because that idea was heresy to the orthodox dogma that ordained Scientists are Saviors.

Humans have equated sickness with Sin for thousands of years, and catching covid has been no exception.

I appreciate the fact you said this and find it ironic you are being downvoted for this heresy!

Natural immunity was used as a justification for some societal responses, particularly by some on one side of the political spectrum.

Thus, some of those on the opposite side will interpret strong natural immunity to COVID-19 as a political loss.

Remember that across the globe, there are many complex political affiliations. As it turns out, the governments that tend to be more authoritarian, such as India, the U.K., or the U.S. during the last cycle, denied the efficacy of wearing masks or getting vaccinated. Boris Johnson went as far as to suggest he get Covid on stage with the cameras rolling, to show the dangers were exaggerated. Now he's well on his way to early retirement, thanks to the damage it's done.

Hmm trying to change history? India govt is right winged but don't think they denied efficiency of masks or vaccination.

Don't know about the U.K or the U.S. but saying Indian Govt. denied the efficacy of wearing masks is false. The Indian Govt. had some questionable reaction to the pandemic but they never denied efficacy of wearing masks and vaccinations. On the contrary they actually encouraged people to wear masks and get vaccinated as fast as possible (when there were plenty of vaccines that is).

Right wing governments are definitely less authoritarian than left wing ones.

Lockdown in left wing countries has been much worse (as in, you can't get out of this area, you need to wear masks outside) than in the UK or the US.

Tbh I was expecting better from the UK Tories and I wish they didn't implement all these restrictions and gave away so much money - but they did way better than other European countries I have friends in. At the same time, I've seen approval for Boris and Rishi Sunak increase among leftists, probably because they enacted pretty left wing policies.

What left wing countries?

I see no true Scotsman, am I right?

I think the 3.5 million deaths were used as justification for certain societal responses. But if you like attacking straw men, who am I to stop you. It is a free country after all!

I expect it works both ways: I expect a weak natural immunity to COVID-19 would have been considered a political loss to some.

I don't have sufficient expertise on the matter to hold strong positions either way.

As far as I am concerned, there was only one side that was trying to score political points. The other side was trying to do what was right based on the best evidence that we had at the time.

https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-...

How would you know if your political party was trying to score political points? What specific criteria would have to be met?

> It almost seems like a lot of people don't want the data to indicate that natural immunity is strong and long lasting, even though the data shows that reinfection is extemely rare.

I too remember when the concept of "natural immunity to Covid" was a wild, dangerous conspiracy theory, along with the "came out of the Wuhan lab" theory. Funny watching the narrative change in real time.

Natural immunity was never a dangerous conspiracy theory. It was simply the case that it was too early to have blind faith in it. No-one credible ever denied that it was possible or even that it was likely that people would gain natural immunity.

> No-one credible ever denied that it was possible or even that it was likely that people would gain natural immunity.

Let's not rewrite history. It was clear that the media (e.g. BBC, below) chose to amplify messages that discredited natural immunity.

[Prof Wendy Barclay said:] "On the balance of evidence, I would say it would look as if immunity declines away at the same rate as antibodies decline away, and that this is an indication of waning immunity."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54696873 Oct 2020.

I don't know that discrediting is a fair assessment. There is evidence of fewer or no markers in blood tests of patients who previously tested positive. Unfortunately it was impossible to tell whether that impacted immunity due insufficient time to collect data.

If losing markers is often an indicator of lost immunity then saying the expectation is lost immunity isn't wrong, even if that like ends up being false.

For instance data around infections from recovered and vaccinated people to others is still scarce to my knowledge. While we know that the health benefits for you are there whether it is enough immunity to completely prevent spread is still hard to examine.

> media [sic] chose to amplify messages that discredited natural immunity

The media is not a recognised scientific body.

The BBC in this case were covering research by Imperial College London, one of the leading contributors to UK COVID-19 research.

In Oct 2020, if someone saw https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54696873 and commented, as you just have, "The media is not a recognised scientific body.", what would you have said?

You are deliberately missing the point. BBC is not a recognized scientific body. It’s an editorial body that editorializes stories and publishes them. It is not a journal.

A lot of things have been said in the media about COVID, most of them wrong and few correct.

There is no conspiracy.

The messages I saw were that achieving herd immunity through infections would result in a whole ton of deaths.

Technically the wild and crazy ones were "it was bio engineered" and "let's ignore it and gain herd immunity". The former was being touted as justification for violence against Asians and the latter would involve millions of deaths in most countries. Tens of millions world wide.

Would being a result of gain of function research with a particular furin cleavage site be considered “bio engineered”?

I don't feel like playing "there isn't enough evidence to prove me wrong"

Source: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

Relevant text: For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so. “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

Approximately 3.5 million globally have died from covid according to the WHO: https://covid19.who.int/

If you include deaths from related factors, like increased poverty or unrest, I'm sure the numbers go up a bit, but not to tens of millions.

I don't state this as an attack, by the way. Covid and its entangled cultural and political issues are enormously emotionally charged, and, one way or another, that tends to skew our perception of even relatively simple facts.

One thing I think the Hacker News community does well, at least aspirationally, is try to keep sight of the fundamental technical details of issues. For a pandemic, having an accurate intuition of its scale falls into this category IMO.

COVID has a death per case rate of 3% give or take. It is estimated that only 1/3 of cases are confirmed. Thus we lose 1% of the people infected.

70% herd immunity without vaccines is 0.7% of your population basically. While I don't think we would lose the 49 million that implies unless we ignored it completely that does make saying we would lose 10s of millions if not for vaccinations not far fetched.

Yes I would put good odds we stay under 10 million in reality. I was only talking about the "natural herd immunity" idea.

I see, I thought you were listing your understanding of the death toll that had already been reached in actuality and not the theoretical potential death toll without vaccine intervention. That makes more sense.

They probably just don't want a repeat of the mis-steps that characterized early covid response. Early information changed a lot and resulted in distrust, and poor adherence to recommended measures. Rolling back precautionary measures is a one time thing. They don't get to say "hey we messed up, put those masks back on" because nobody will comply. It just makes sense to come up with a sure consensus before natural immunity is bandied about.

The lab leak theory is still not proven. Collected evidence over time points to it being more likely. The "narrative" was there early on, but attacking China as leverage in a trade war surely cemented any desire to hide their own faults. What did we stand to gain by pointing fingers without proof or even a preponderance of evidence? Even now is it likely to lead to reform in virus and gain of function research?

China wants to hide their own faults. Everything they do supports this narrative. To lose face might mean an end to power. Reforms are only possible by pointing likely theories because the proof is gone and it happened months before the outbreak was even registered.

Natural immunity is great. If you survive. And if you don't give it to others.

Almost impossible not to give it to others.

Relying on it was pretty reckless, especially given how little we understand it.

This statement is overly alarmist. 98% of people survive covid. >85% are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. The vast majority of people survive without any issues. The biggest problem with covid is how infectious it is, which is what really overwhelms health care systems.

Over alarmist? You're saying 2% of people who get an incredibly transmissible disease die, and you aren't alarmed? I mean, sure its not Ebola, but its not a cold either. Sheez.

> Almost impossible not to give it to others.

Your facts are old, very old.

Transmissibility has been linked to the nasopharyngeal viral load during onset symptoms. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33296437/] The virus may not be as present in your nasal discharge, or breath. We've also known from the start transmissibility is also definitely not linked to the severity of symptoms.

When you read from articles from the CDC such as [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...] they don't mean all people spread it the same way, just "we have found it spreads commonly in these three ways".

Ironically enough, we traced my positive infection to a non-human animal which sneezed in my face. Within a day I had conjunctivitis (pinkeye). I had non-typical symptoms before severe fatigue set in. I just thought I was going through bad caffeine withdrawal at the time.

Locked inside the house with my spouse and kids for two weeks with symptoms, breathing all over each other, laughing in each others faces, touching the same items, etc.

I only got tested on day 13 when the respiratory and heart symptoms set in. 6 months later I still have some lingering issues. Nobody else in the house or who I associated with ever got it, and they tested every 5 days for a month.

I hope you are recovering well.

Honestly not sure what your point is. Are you saying that for someone who is infected that the probability of not giving it to others around you is not very high?

The gist of what I'm saying is that even if you think that your chances of dying, or even inconvenience, from the virus is extremely low, your ability to control its spread to others is also pretty low. Meaning that you can become a vector to someone who is at high risk. So people going to corona-parties thinking only about the impact on themselves is reckless and selfish.

Initially my point was to correct misinformation. I added my own history as an anecdote.

There's a lot to say about Covid-19. We've learned a lot about it since the start. But objectively, its transmissibility is not what was feared. So the scare tactics about that -today- is wrong.

Covid-19 can be deadly. All people and politicians should have taken it seriously. I don't fault people for being enthusiastic in their political corner, and in the U.S. there were a lot of lines crossed by both sides.

My personal reaction was to be overly cautious. I got it anyway when I started being less strict. And it was nearly as bad as I feared. But I also think governments were wrong to force shutdowns, prevent assembly, etc. It was a misuse, and a spectacle.

High risk people have the option to do what they need to, or to be surrounded by people who advocates for them. (And that right there, I bet, is where you and I will fundamentally disagree). And I respect your disagreement.

Without safe vaccines we'd be having a different conversation. But now is the time to find more answers, spread truth, and be good to one another.

I actually find it a little fascinating that your comment, the first two replies (and mine) all differ tremendously in what we deem important takeaways.

As my doctor puts it "It is definitely a strange bug".

I still don't see the misinformation. I said, that it was "almost impossible not to give it to others". I said the virus was extremely transmissible. It is. With an R0 of approximately 5.7 [[1]]. I didn't say anything about when or how transmission happens.

There was a moment where we thought our daughter had the virus. It became quite clear how futile it was to avoid her infecting everyone else in the house. Fortunately for everyone, it was something else.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251932...

Sort of. The infectious disease experts I know and worked with this past year are less worried about a political point and more worried that the immunity fades.

They must not think or read very deeply into their own field then, because there exists the phenomenom of immunological memory, ie the effect where memory B/T cells lay dormant in the body for decades, and upon exposure to the characteristic antigen of SARS-2 (in this case) they ramp up antibody production exponentially. This results in - theoretically, but this is definitely what happens - lower peak viral load, lower symptomacity, and thus lower transmission and a shorter disease course.

Thus even when full immunity to reinfection is gone - which btw the estimates I’ve seen are that IgG lasts a few years before the individual is seronegative again - there will still be immunological memory which persists indefinitely and vastly reduces mortality and morbidity.

What always tickles me is if the immunity fades, you get a bout of no taste and smell for a few days, and recover again.

But we aren’t testing as much, so it’ll be worse for those at risk

I’m not sure if all natural immunities are stronger, or even strong. I’m not denying those exists but I also personally know 3 people that have gotten COVID-19 twice.

If natural immunity only protects against a particular strain and the vaccine against a group of them I think that’s still a solid reason to continue pushing for people to get vaccinated.

The vaccines (so far) all use sequences of the spike protein from an early sample of COVID-19. They just make spike proteins and your body sees it and becomes immune to it. They've made some modifications, but for better stability/structure outside of the virus, but not (yet) to address variants.

If anything, infection from current circulating virus is more relevantly effective (but obviously more dangerous than the vaccines).

What I wonder is how much post-infection immunity might be from something other than just the spike protein, and therefore a bit more flexible against new variants than our strictly 'detect the spike protein' vaccination programmes.

And how 'flexible' immunity is from infection vs. vaccination.

Yes exactly this. Naturalistic immunity learns a more diverse set of epitopes. Whereas the artificial-spike-protein immunity is learning just the S protein. The spike is super important but it’s not the only source of epitopes. And I’ve seen some papers on immunology of SARS-2 that do show a lot of activity that’s not based around the spike protein.

This notion that natural immunity is “worse” or won’t be able to handle the “variants” is completely contrary to the evidence as well as just basic napkin immunology. It’s, IMO, purely an idea spread implicitly through media headlines with the obvious intent of convincing people who don’t benefit from the vaccine (those who have already recovered successfully from COVID-19) to get it. I’ve talked to multiple friends in real life who had PCR-confirmed COVID/19, recovered, and got the vaccine anyway (which of course had even worse side effects than the usual second shot syndrome since the immune system had already been sensitized to SARS-2), and upon my prodding they basically all seemed to think they needed the vaccine to be protected against “the variants”.

Aye, I’d much rather fight the bull head on than play matador

>The vaccines (so far) all use sequences of the spike protein from an early sample of COVID-19.

This is not true of Sinovac, which is a "good-old-fashioned" vaccine and provides exposure to the full (dead) virus.

For influenza it's been found that natural immunity provides better protection against future variants than vaccination https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/

Anecdotally, I've known at least three people who have caught Covid twice during the pandemic. This runs contrary to your statement that natural immunity "is strong and long lasting". Rather, it is a forgetful, fickle thing to rely upon. Get vaccinated.

Anecdotally, I don’t know anyone personally who has gotten COVID. That doesn’t mean that I discount science and don’t believe that it exists.

Reinfection is extremely low otherwise it would have shown itself in the data. That’s really a simple fact.

Or maybe some people thought that serious accusations like this require evidence and looked askance upon Trump's xenophobic blame-shifting and hate-mongering. "the China virus" he likes to say.

And we see the consequences with old Asian ladies being punched in streets by young white thugs.

I've personally always held it as a possibility. But no way I'll defend the Trump administration on this.

> And we see the consequences with old Asian ladies being punched in streets by young white thugs.

Speaking of hate-mongering..are we seeing the same data on anti-Asian attacks?

If you have data, cough it up joe.

Let me see if I can say restate this more clearly.

I have always accepted the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in China. However, like many other Americans, I refused to be drawn into public speculation about it by people, like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, with a political and ideological interest in stoking xenophobia. In particular, I saw their attempt to blame China--before definitive evidence was acquired--as an attempt to shift blame away for the Trump administration's dismal response to the virus to external actors.

And yes, we have seen a rise in anti-Asian hate crime and sinophobia in America, largely as a result of this kind of rhetoric.

Enough time has passed that social distancing, masks, vaccines have become moral issues to many.

“Only bad people don’t wear masks” mentality. Completely separate from if they are still needed or not.

Almost like it's okay to dismiss statements made without ample research and evidence and accept them later when due diligence has been done.

Thats not how science works.

1. First you make a hypothesis.

2. Then you gather data.

If people arent allowed to make hypotheses or gather data around hypotheses, we can't do the scientific method.

How do you know that reinfection is rare esp for variants? We've been in lock down and meant of those infected self isolate voluntarily or as a consequence of being sick.

And what's the consequence of your pov? That everyone just gets sick and those who make it are all good? What good is public policy if it doesn't protect the public?

It's been very interesting to me listening particularly to American podcasts and the extent to which the American left equates Covid rules to piety. You can here that there's significant genuine resistantance to the idea of letting go of the restrictions as they've become part of identity.

I'm American, but I've lived in Germany for the last 20 years. Here, vaccines are being used as the carrot to be able to get rid of the restrictions (like mask wearing, limiting of contacts, etc.). It feels like everyone wants to get rid of the restrictions here, and it's more of a fight about who gets to do that first and why.

My impression, as a German still following US politics post-Trump more than I should, is that US governors, especially the GOP ones, never put real restrictions in place and were among the first to get rid of them. Examples include Texas and Florida.

In Germany everything Covid turned political last fall, with Laschet being anti-restrictions and Söder being pro-restrictions. In both cases to score political points for their campaigns to become the conservative's candidate for chancellor.

Everybody wants back a normal life, some people simply have trouble accepting that it will take a while still. And that doing it prematurely poses a significant risk.

It certainly seems very hard for a lot of people in countries with high vaccination percentage to cope with Corona being "just another disease" at this point.

My hope is that all the laws and restrictions will be rolled back as we learn that we can live with Corona.

As someone who had COVID 6 months ago and is currently awaiting the result of a PCR test I hope this is true!

PCR test? Shouldn't you have gone for a serology test?

I think OP is saying they're testing to see if they have COVID now. Hoping not to be reinfected.

Neither the vaccine nor a previous infection will prevent you from catching the virus again, but it will prevent you from falling ill which is all that really matters.

You'll obviously get some virus in your body, but a lot less because most of it (hopefully) gets destroyed before it can reproduce.

It will still be picked up by a PCR test depending on the number of replication cycles. Which is why mass testing everyone, including healthy people, is such a dumb idea.

Only if the number of cycles wasn't pre defined. Which it is, nobody is running cycles until a PCR test turns positive.

That's not the only possibility. The number could also be predefined to a level making the tests too sensitive (which incidentally is the case in many countries, currently). If you have absolutely no virus particles the test couldn't detect them no matter how many cycles you go through.

Generally in the past, it was accepted practice that doctors do specific tests to get more certainty with diagnosing certain infections in a patient that's showing symptoms matching that disease. You could make a case for mass testing healthy people for all kinds of infectious diseases but for economical reasons I doubt many would support it. If we did that we'd have to somehow account for all the false positives, then.

Does anyone know if PCR tests will find out if you've had the virus, after you had the vaccine?

I got a rapid test after getting the first vaccine -- I was told that there were more than one type of antibodies, the vaccine only provides one, so they can test for the others to see if you had the virus proper.

PCR tests only detect live virus, not antibodies.

there are several antibody tests for covid. As far as I'm aware, the vaccines only trigger the anti-spike protein antibodies, so if you test positive for other types of covid-19 antibodies, you've probably had it.

PCR test detect genetic material of the virus. It may be live virus it may be just fragments, impossible to tell.

PCR tests don't detect antibodies, they detect active virus. Antibody tests may be what you're thinking of.

See: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/coronavirus-d...

I don't know the answer to your question, but it would make sense unless the antibody test(s) look for a specific type of antibody to COVID-19 that is produced naturally when infected and not just any antibodies that might be produced when vaccinated.

incorrect, PCR tests detect any virus matter - active or otherwise. This is a very important distinction since we've seem to lost our minds collectively and label PCR tests with a cycle threshold of >40 as a true positive.

"lost our minds collectively" -- no, made a sane tradeoff in the sensitivity vs. specificity ratio when the disease is common. It's not like the sensitivity is wonderful even with a large number of PCR cycles, and the false positive rate was not too bad.

As the disease becomes less common, it makes sense to turn down the sensitivity of the test. Base rate fallacy, yada yada.

here's a study showing above CT 32 not a single live virus was able to be cultured [1] - if this study accurately portrays reality then there's nothing resembling sanity with PCR CTs >40

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

(image from the study) https://i.imgur.com/AaZZIXM.png

People who are infected will not necessarily have a single live virus in a swab you collect. Yes, if you can't culture it, they probably are not infectious right now but that is a different distinction.

You're also putting a whole lot of weight on a study with what, about 50 total positives? And of them, very few with a Ct of over 35.

do you know of a study that shows the opposite? Because I know of more studies that have similar findings.

here's one I found with a quick google (haven't read the study)

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.1c00166

Even your studies show a relatively low false positive rate with high numbers of cycles, and it's hoped that it increases sensitivity. No, we have no perfect data, because we have no perfect "infection test".

High sensitivity was very worthwhile early in the pandemic, when infection was common and the predictive value of a test with a somewhat higher false positive rate was still high. Now that COVID is becoming rarer, we should absolutely be reducing cycle counts. The target should be to keep >75% of positives with actual infection even as the underlying rate of the disease decreases. I think we've exceeded this threshold by a large margin thus far. If you have a cogent statistical argument that disagrees instead of handwaving about cycle counts, I'm willing to listen.

1st study says zero active virus beyond CT>32 and 2nd study shows 34ct is the cutoff for infectivity and that 2nd study also cites a 3rd study that ct>35 decreased to 8% active viruses

All of those numbers are below 40ct - if this doesn't convince you that 40ct is the wrong number I don't know what to say - you've provided zero evidence that 40ct is beneficial and try to downplay extremely high false positives shown in three studies when you go to 40ct

"Extremely high false positives"-- no, inability to culture from the specimens, which isn't the same thing as a false positive. Please stop conflating the two.

It's a sensitivity vs. specificity issue, as I've said before, and I'm willing to listen to arguments on those grounds.

As the studies you've cited show, the vast majority of positive samples become so before 30 cycles. Then there's these relatively few "weak positive" results, where the ability to culture live virus is less. There's not enough of these to explain the number of cases, deaths, or overall excess mortality (as you've attempted to say elsewhere here, and others have rightfully corrected you). And these results being considered a positive is arguably a good thing while the virus is very common, as I've attempted to explain to you.

> 2nd study shows 34ct is the cutoff for infectivity and that 2nd study also cites a 3rd study that ct>35 decreased to 8% active viruses

Yes, but "infective at the moment you took the test" is not a useful metric. You want more people to be positive than this, so you can A) contact trace people who were infectious immediately before, and B) get people who were just infected to stay home -before- they're infectious.

Of course, now that we're on a major downslope of cases, this tradeoff is changing...

This is just silly, if you reject the methodology used in these studies to determine effective CT thresholds then it's pretty pointless having a conversation with someone who refuses to do anything other than restate their opinion without providing and evidence that supports their opinions.

As I've repeatedly told you-- you're overstating your evidence here. Infectivity is not the gold standard of what should be a positive test.

Find a lab that offers Roche Anti-Sars-cov2-N test.

Interesting, is this one just for Pfizer as I've had Astra Zenica which I believe is a different set of spike protein DNA sequences?

This one's for the nucleocapsid protein. If you'd like to test antibody generated by the vaccines, you'd have to take the Anti-sarscov2-S test.

All currently used vaccines use the same version of the spike protein sequence.

Incorrect. Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J use a pre-fusion stabilized sequence. AZ does not.

However, all currently used vaccines are just the spike (S) protein plus possible non-COVID proteins (in the viral vector vaccines), so none will induce antibodies against the COVID N protein.

I imagine it might be possible to guess whether someone was vaccinated with the AZ vaccine based on whether they have antibodies that are specific to the site that’s modified in the stabilized sequences. I don’t think anyone does a test like that.

My girlfriend got infected about ten days after my second AstraZeneca jab. We didn't isolate. I got tested:

- Zero naturally-occurring antibodies (the kind you would get from having had COVID).

- Strong presence of vaccine-induced antibodies.

However, given the timing, I am still uncertain as to whether I contracted COVID during that post-second-jab 4 weeks when my girlfriend was infected (I gave blood for the test while I was still feeling bad in the weeks after the second injection, and I didn't spring for the 'currently infected' test, since the whole package of tests was pretty expensive).

If I got COVID now, would it not be handled exclusively by vaccine-induced antibodies, which means that any test for having had COVID in the future would still be negative?

I'm no kind of doubter, and I'm pretty sure the AZ double-jab helped me lately, but I'm not sure I'll ever know if I was ever infected, to be honest.

Even if you were, if you didn't have any symptoms the vaccine did it's job. In which case you were not infectious neither.

I hope you better half fully recovered by now.

PCR, no, antibody tests do. E.g. if you give blood with the Red Cross right now, they will do a basic antibody test that will react if you have had COVID or if you have been vaccinated. If you test positive for that, they do a second test that will only react if you have been exposed to the real virus.

The big question is whether this can be read as "Vaccinated with Sinovac or CoviVac (i.e. a vaccine based on the whole but inactivated virus, as opposed to mRNA or a vector)? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime".

What happened in Manaus/Brazil(high re-infection rate even after the city reached herd immunity) shows that's not that simple and they clearly state it "though viral variants could dampen some of the protection they offer"

Very much it.

Getting influenza antibodies once only protects you for that season, until a new strain emerges few months down the line.

But influenza virus mutates much more quickly than Sars-cov-2.

"mutates" is probably the wrong word. My understanding is that it combines different genes. That's why the names for different flue viruses always contain numbers: to indicate which forms of the different proteins the genes are expressing.

influenza mutates much faster than the covid family [1] - looking at the other coronavirus family there is plenty of reason to have expectations that this will become an endemic mild seasonal cold. The most similar coronaviruses provide life long immunity (please don't mistake immunity as being unable to experience symptoms, just means bad clinical outcomes will likely plummet due to immune system recognition) [2]

[1] https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/06/10/sars-cov-2-dna-suggests-singl... [2]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.17.423313v1....

Listening to the Prof. Drosten Podcast (German only), he highly doubts that they actually had reached herd immunity before their second deadly wave.

He rather assumes something like 40% and then the mutated variant raged on (not badly affecting but infecting the 40% partially, and thus driving the infections).

As of today, there are only 84 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, with three deaths. https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-t...

You've linked to an article from August 2020 when it was still very much hoped that reinfections are just a fluke - virus particles not cleaned from the system or something like that. We have better data now, that comes from different methods and agrees quite well:

"Protection against repeat infection was 80·5% (95% CI 75·4–84·5).... among those aged 65 years and older, observed protection against repeat infection was 47·1% (95% CI 24·7–62·8)"

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

"A study of blood donors in the city of Manaus has found that 1 in 6 of those infected with the coronavirus were reinfected with the P.1 variant."

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1353

"A previous history of SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with an 84% lower risk of infection,"

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

>You've linked to an article from August 2020

That's when the article was first published. As it states, it is updated twice a week. Look at the most recent entries.

I see. I didn't study it much after checking that my mom (hospitalized twice 4 months apart) and our music teacher at school (3 months apart) were not listed there. They use a pretty strict measure for "confirmed" - a case study being published.

Care to comment on the studies I've linked?

It's not clear at all how many people got COVID in Manaus. Testing was pretty bad at the time, and as a consequence the number of people that actually tested positive was far form enough to make an impact.

There was some gossip about an study that indicated a high level of immunity at one time, but when it was released, it actually didn't say that.

I’m personally sceptical of putting too much faith in this, we’ve already seen a number of variants. Over my lifetime? Who knows what mutations we’ll see.

Hopefully the mutations will slow over time - the mutations at the moment may be the 'easy' ones.

The various non-novel corona- and rhinoviruses that cause common cold don't seem to have had any problems playing catch with the human immune system for who knows how many thousand years. SARS-CoV-2 is probably more likely than not to just become a new member of the family of "domestic" human pathogens that we learn to live with.

"learning to live with it" includes filtering out those who can't learn fast enough.

The vaccine manufacturers are already gearing up for booster shots, so we won't have to trust it in the long term- new strains can be met with new vaccines.

In that case won't it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

No. It was suspected from the beginning that booster shots would be necessary. There are just so many variants and the infection has spread to so many people that it was unrealistic to expect a single round would eliminate the virus.

There's a very real risk of covid vaccines being necessary every year.

The common consensus among scientists now is that the vaccine works against most if not all variants as well.

The vaccine, yes. But I'm not sure there's such consensus around homegrown antibodies.

The vaccine elicits homegrown anti-bodies. It's the same anti-bodies.

I don't doubt that at all but would love to see the evidence! I'm wondering how they show that, maybe DNA sequencing of T-cell receptor sequence? Or is it only through reactivity if specific proteins? Off to search about T-cell repertoire data...

A good start is researching how vaccines work.

Aha, I think you may have been in error in your post, then.

Vaccines can be targeted to many different parts of a virus, usually different parts of the surface protein. Different vaccines for the same virus may result in entirely different antibodies.

Even the same vaccine may result in different antibodies in different people. The process of antibody creation is random, and involves recombination of specific DNA chunks. And it's different in T cells and B cells.

So to say that the vaccine and the disease generate the same antibodies has meaning, but it needs to be shown by evaluating the specific protein sequences (most likely by sequencing the DNA or RNA that creates the antibody).

>> Vaccines can be targeted to many different parts of a virus,

Same antibodies even if it is a subset.

It's the reason that the vaccine works whether it's a full set or a subset it still has to create the same antibodies that attack the natural virus.

That's also why antibodies targeting Ebola virus don't work on Corona because they're not the same Corona antibodies.

You're splitting hairs with flowery language and it feels a little disingenuous.

Scientists have found that people who had SARS are immune to COVID. Their T cells fight it off. There was another variant of a coronavirus that went around and people who got that seem to be immune to. Some scientists testing on older blood samples found this. The older coronavirus didn't cause major issues in society and went unnoticed.

I share this to say that there is reason to believe that we will be able to fight this off, even with mutations. It's not baseless hope.

> Scientists have found that people who had SARS are immune to COVID

Citation needed.

Here's one... https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832v1....

That study has N=24 and only studies T-cell response, which is a long way from being "immune" to infection. It is also a preprint and appears it has not yet been peer reviewed.

So, basically, some immune response is not the same as immunity against COVID-19, which is what your OP (over-)claimed.

But it really doesn't tell us anything we didn't know. SARS-COV-1 and SARS-COV-2 are related and there is some cross-activation of immune response. It is not an epidemiological study or anything.

And every new study like this confirms we didn’t know enough about it to propose solutions like “herd immunity”

Isn't this the sort of study and conclusion that would give weight to "herd immunity"?

To you, is there any study/conclusion that would allow us to propose solutions like "herd immunity"?

By that, I presume you mean sit back and do nothing, and let 'immunity' arise from infections.

That doesn't work with Covid because the mortality rate is too high and the infection rate leads to healthcare being overwhelmed.

If there was evidence that the mortality rate was low (but we have evidence of the opposite) or that the infection rate didn't spike upwards and start clogging up the beds that hospitals have which are able to deal with Covid (but we have evidence of the opposite), then that might be a conclusion that would permit proposing it. But we have direct evidence of the opposite.

It will work fine for younger populations though.

Young populations are not hermetically sealed away from older populations.

And even then, some of the young deaths have been horrific - e.g. the blood-drenched walls from the 13 year old who died, see https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13519684/shock-photos-blood-bo...

Herd immunity seems like a default assumption?

At worst, we will always end up with the herd immunity solution. Others need to prove themselves to be more effective

I know two people who had covid and who right now have a second covid infection by the british mutation. One of them also had their first vaccination.

I don't really believe stories on the internet.

There's a lot of context missing.

Like the fact that 3% of the population are hypochondriacs.

It's still anecdotal, but my cousin's wife who is a nurse also had covid twice, both of them confirmed infections(as in, she tested positive), the second one was after she'd received her first shot(not sure which vaccine, but one of the 2-dose ones)

I have no clue if they were different variants or what caused her to not be immune, or how unlucky she were(this might be exceedingly rare) but for me it's been a good anecdote to tell people who think they don't need the vaccine because they already had covid.

Get vaccinated!

>> anecdotes aren't anthema to logic. THey're all that is required to disprove universally stated truths. So if some vax-denier says "healthly people can't get covid twice" your anecdote is good enough.

The real problem is that despite all their talk of science and facts they're not going to be convinced. That's just window dressing for their wrong beliefs.

The value of vaccines is for society as a whole but the majority of us who get vaccinated do so for very selfish reasons: we don't want to get sick, we perceive the risk worth it, etc. The vast majority of anti-vaxers are still driven by the same base needs, we just haven't found the motivator that triggers action. Something as simple as vacinne passports would probably do it.

> Something as simple as vacinne passports would probably do it.

Let me fix it for you:

"Something as simple as restricting the freedom of movement of healthy individuals who committed no crime, in violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, would cause people with WRONG BELIEFS (sic!) to behave in ways that I like. Namely, I want them to give up control of their bodies for the greater social good, which is defined by their government. So long as the government agrees with me, naturally, which I expect them to do forever.

The unwashed masses are in need of some enlightened herding. The human rights are there only for times of no consequence; but these are extraordinary, revolutionary times!"

And people wonder where do totalitarian regimes recruit their support base from.

Thank you for this. My feelings exactly. Corona has shown me how easy it is to create fanatics to enforce any crazy rules in a fascist dictatorship.

If we ever get a Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini in this country it will be truly scary how many people will happily follow the narrative and support hurting others who don't.

There's a vast gulf between anti-vaxxers and people who just don't want to put a non FDA approved, untested substance in their body that was developed in a rush over 6 months with no manufacturer accountability for a virus that they're not vulnerable to.

It's a little disingenuous and black and white thinking of you to label them as the same.

It would be like me calling you a Covid fanatic and a member of a Covid cult. It's extreme caricature of your views.

unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal - in the US the CDC recommended cycle thresholds of >40 to signify a true positive. That is beyond insane - with the flu we recognize false positives are likely after just a CT of 23!

Your friends likely got sick twice, maybe once from covid and PCR tested positive twice. This is what the current literature understands - it's not impossible that you'recorrect, but unlikely.

> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal

I keep hearing this argument, but it's unconvincing. Here in Alberta we've seen positive cases and hospitalizations and deaths move in relation to each-other. If the false positive was so high we wouldn't be able to make out that pattern from the noise, but it's incredibly obvious. Also, in the early days we saw case rates much lower than the false positive rates I saw talked about, and so that doesn't hold water either.

covid deaths are labeled based on positive test results (and clinical diagnosis) so they will always move together regardless of specificity or sensitivity

here's a study showing above CT 32 not a single live virus was able to be cultured [1]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

(image from the study) https://i.imgur.com/AaZZIXM.png

I didn't say just deaths, hospitalizations as well. In Alberta people were until just this week experiencing severe and acute respiratory distress in droves, so much so that our ICU was at the highest capacity ever and specifically 3/4 full of COVID+ patients, and this is sheer coincidence that it matches up with surge in positive test cases from several weeks ago? Our premier actually noted that a large group of cases currently in hospital were in the sub 50 age group as evidence that the vaccination against COVID 19 is working for the above 50's[1], who have had the opportunity to be vaccinated. Given all these facts it suggest to me there is an acute respiratory disease that is running rampant through my province that responds well to the COVID vaccine.

How do you explain this? How do you explain record ICU numbers and uncharacteristically large groups of the young being stricken by a respiratory condition in May, long after cold and flu season and matching record COVID case numbers?

[1]https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1396587241087062016

Well I don't really feel I have to explain anything? The diligent work put into CT by researchers shows high CT positives are very likely false positives.

But I can offer up some explanations regardless, just for the sake of conversation. Any respiratory infection that gets hospitalized with high CT covid tests is capable of being a misdiagnosed CV19 infection. I'm unsure about CA, but in the US there are huge financial incentives to misdiagnose a patient as cv19+

As for record number of patients (I'll take your word for it as in the US the actual ICU numbers are lower for 2020 than 2019 and hospitalizations countrywide 2020 at no point were higher than 2019) - I think that a much more logical conclusion is that people were scared to go to the hosptial - preventative visits/treatments were delayed and now you're dealing with the predictable rise in illness due to disruption to healthcare from government regulations and overall hysteria keeping people from the hospital that would've otherwise been there.

Disruptions as small as daylight savings changes is associated with large spikes in heart attacks - it's really not surprising that global disruption will have negative health repercussions.

As far as I'm aware there is zero financial incentive here in Canada, and that argument sounds a lot like they are knowingly faking the cases, which is a much different argument than the diagnostic doesn't work and implies malice.

Just to remove doubt, the ICU has been record setting[1]. As an aside, that article even discusses your claim about bad PCR tests.

And are you saying that people have delayed their care to the point where they are now in the ICU, just under half of who are sub 50, and all those happen to be because of a respiratory infection? In addition, those peaks of ICU numbers have started to come down. It must be a coincidence that case counts have been dropping for a while here - how does that make sense if it's just people delaying care? It really doesn't meet any sort of sense that the peaks are always linked.

Alberta has put together a great data portal[2], complete with tracking case counts and severe cases. It's easy to see, based upon the actual data, how the cases, hospitalizations, and ICU are related.

[1]https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-icus-treat... [2]https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

I'm really not sure where the disconnect is, because all of that seems highly reasonable to me.

Yes, I'm saying people avoided preventative care because they were scared to go near hospitals - this is not a controversial topic, it's clear that is true.

I'm not sure about your point with respiratory infections but covid goes on the death certificate with a recent positive test even if you died in a car accident.

No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.

> I'm not sure about your point with respiratory infections but covid goes on the death certificate with a recent positive test even if you died in a car accident.

> No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.

But these positives come BEFORE the hospitalizations and deaths. I don't feel like you're understanding the order of events - high cases AND then hospitalizations after weeks. You keep describing events where people are retroactively proven to have COVID - this isn't the case. These are people who test positive and then later enter hospital.

I think you may misunderstand my point. I'm not claiming covid doesn't go up and increase hospitalization - I'm simply saying there are a lot of false positives. Of course there are real cases that precede hospitalizations, but that correlation does nothing to show there aren't massive false positives. The more covid is spreading, the more real cases but also the more false positives. You need covid virus in the patient to test positive. A false positive means the patient isn't sick with covid, not that there exists no covid on that patient.

covid spread increases -> hospitalizations go up - we both agree on this point

covid spread increases -> false positives increase due to more viral spread that will attack asymptomatic/immune individuals (we do know that other coronaviruses have cross immunity with cv19 so it's not uncommon to be asymptomatic due to preexisting immunity)

> A false positive means the patient isn't sick with covid, not that there exists no covid on that patient. > false positives increase due to more viral spread that will attack asymptomatic/immune individuals

Ok, so it sounds like you're making the argument that a patient, who has COVID in their system, but is asymptomatic and tests positive would be considered a false positive, even though they can still spread the virus?

Please cite your source that positives at >40ct can still be infectious since I've already provided evidence strongly disagreeing with your assertion here.

You supplied a single study for evidence and then an imgur link.

I wasn't even aware that there was doubt that asymptomatic spread was a thing. I realize now the issue - I believe that someone who has a COVID 19 infection, symptomatic or not, is someone infected with COVID 19, and you've decided that they aren't until they show symptoms. How do you feel about HIV?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03141-3 https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease... https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2021/01/11/asympt...

At no point did I say or suggest people not showing symptoms are incapable of infecting someone with cv19. I'm not sure where you've come to the conclusion this conversation was ever about asymptomatic spread. PCR tests have nothing to do with symptoms.

However, I am very familiar with the study you've linked. If you can even call it a study - it's more like a fantasy model based on the data of other studies the researchers appear to not even have read! They cite numbers from multiple papers that can't be found in those papers anywhere. There might not be a more embarrassing study I've read than this one.

There first citation to Lee et. al. claims the paper found 100% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals, yes 100%. here's a quote from the actual paper

> Although the high viral load we observed in asymptomatic patients raises a distinct possibility of a risk for transmission, our study was not designed to determine this

(you'll note at nowhere in the paper is there anything resembling 100% spread in asymptomatic compared to symptomatic...this number is purely fabricated from thin air)

another citation from that paper is a citation to char et. al. that says the paper claims 40-140% infectiousness for asymptomatic individuals...again let's read the actual paper they cite

here's a quote from the paper

> In the household setting, symptomatic case-patients had 2.7 times the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their close contacts, compared with asymptomatic and presymptomatic case-patients

so the above paper deals with household settings and finds roughly 1/3 in a household setting...this paper very generously makes up numbers again to cite to this paper...embarrassing.

the cite mc evoy et. al. as having a finding of 40-70% which they got right! horray!

so 2/3 papers they use to determine their asymptomatic infectious number for their modeling are just garbage citations that don't resemble the findings of the source paper at all

this paper is worse than useless.

again, their model sets the infectiousness rate of asymptomatic individuals based on 3 citations - 2 of which are fabricated...garbage...utter garbage.

QUESTION:

Are people who have died in car accidents counted as COVID-19 deaths?

ANSWER:

No. There is a two-level system in place to make sure death counts are accurate.

www.wusa9.com/amp/article/news/verify/covid-deaths-car-crash-comorbidities-coronavirus-death-total-counts-john-hopkins-study/65-e3842ed2-f753-4a15-8b97-c2ae75c2b2ce

Incorrect, they are absolutely counted as covid deaths early on and will likely be re-categorized later, your article even says as much - later corrections are easy for car crashes, but they are not easy for misdiagnosis

either way the context of the conversation is about early trends so my point still stands and is validated by the article you've linked, even.

Misdiagnosis can go either way, not always in favour of covid.

Early trends showed severe undercounting when later compared to excess mortality, probably due to low testing capacity at the start. See here for some more information on the undercounting: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

You’ll have to point out in the previous article where it agrees with your point on car crashes counted as covid deaths, it does not show this in the version of the article that is presented to me.

your linked article simply shows gross deaths above baseline are not entirely accounted for by covid - that's not surprising in the least when you disrupt the entire world you'll have deaths from the disruption alongside covid. It makes no attempt at showing covid is undercounted.

If anything I would use that as an argument to show lockdowns may very well be doing substantial harm and causing massive death.

This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that not a single country in the top 30 excess mortality during the pandemic is a country that avoided stringent lockdowns.

Correlation != causation of course, but it's a logical thought to investigate and there's plenty more evidence towards lockdown's doing more harm than good (considering the evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking)

as for your request - I never said the article agrees with my point about car crashes counted as covid deaths, I said it agrees with me that the correction happens later.

You can easily disprove the “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view by looking at countries such as Norway, which had had lockdowns but no significant excess mortality.

I also don’t understand the “evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking” line. We now have multiple waves in multiple countries. My country (Scotland) specifically has peaks in infections that are then followed by falls as a result of lockdowns. In fact we are now seeing infections rise as we ease restrictions again. These falls go against normal seasonal behaviours for respiratory illnesses, so it’s clear that something else is causing the fall - the lockdown!

The fact that a virus needs contact with people to spread is literally virus 101, and therefore limiting contact suppresses transmission - how do you come to the conclusion that this is not the case?

I responded to one of your other comments saying the same thing - norway did not have "lockdowns" like much of the developed world...sweden had more stringent lockdowns than norway. Either way a single datapoint doesn't prove anything, but you're wrong on even your single datapoint.

Lockdowns don't limit transmission because, in the US, only 40% of the economy shut down and traveling metrics didn't go down for very long. It's not that social distancing can't work - it's that it didn't work for likely very complex reasons.

I have replied to your assertions in the other comment thread.

We also have excess deaths to measure covid deaths against: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Some are graphed here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

You can see that some countries that did lock down, e.g. Norway didn’t have significant excess mortality so this can dispel any myths about lockdowns themselves causing excess mortality. I’m sure some people will argue that the excess deaths in their country were caused by the lockdown, but in my experience it’s not worth your time arguing back at this stage.

norway locked down with less stringency than sweden - you can see that using the only objective measurements of lockdown stringency (that I know of) in the oxford stringency index

I'm not sure why you would state something completely incorrect so confidently - if you had in fact been arguing with people over that point I would expect you to have come across the most basic data behind your point.

https://i.imgur.com/obQNg3o.png

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...

Your assertions don't fit with the data you shared. The Y axis shows strictness and Norway has peaks that are higher and therefore stricter. I suspect you know this given you tried to double-down on it immediately.

If we are playing "No true Scotsman" with the lockdowns and dragging Sweden in, how would you explain Greece vs Sweden?

Excess Deaths per 100k [0]

Sweden: 102 Greece: 38

There is simply no compelling evidence that “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view.

Excess Mortality source:

[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Your favoured metric of lockdown severity:

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...

a single comparison really does nothing, here's japan vs sweden that shows the exact opposite - neither of these comparisons are useful for anything other than a datapoint that should be used to study the larger issue alongside all the other data we have

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...

deaths per million: japan: 103.81 sweden: 1,404.99

again, even though my single datapoint is a much stronger contrast - these single datapoints are not useful as evidence for/against lockdowns

It does do something. It proves you can lockdown without the lockdown itself causing significant excess mortality and gives more credence (as if it’s needed) to the excess mortality that is being seen in other countries being caused purely by COVID.

COVID skeptics are full of assertions such as: It’s just the flu, PCR tests are worthless, the lockdown is killing more people than it’s saving, suicides are way up, we won’t have a second wave etc. When these are proven false they come up with a new assertion, ignoring that they have been wrong about every assertion so far. The scary thing is they seem to sing from the same hymn sheet, so they are being fed this information from somewhere.

It doesn’t matter so much now that people are getting vaccinated, but the vocal minority was a real risk to the integrity of the measures such as lockdowns. If you get a critical mass of people believing this BS then you’ve got a real problem. We’ve seen how the Q-Anon misinformation movement has had real consequences but people seem oblivious when they are being fed FUD about COVID.

you should reread what you've just written and think a bit about who you think the problem is

we were having a conversation pretty tightly scoped to PCR tests that got loosened up (by you) to include lockdowns.

Now you're talking about Q-Anon among other unrelated things. If you want to have meaningful conversation that changes minds by informing people - this isn't the way to do it. It very much seems like you just lump everything into one big ball of political hot topic and leave very little room for nuance from people who disagree with you.

That's very unproductive and I'd suggest this mentality of assuming someone elses position based on political hot topics de jour is exactly why so many people are tribalistic when it comes to choosing what they believe with science.

You’re right about some of the things you are saying, I’ve maybe lumped you unfairly due to first hand experience.

Unfortunately, with my sample size of 2, I have seen the Q-Anon stuff happening real time. Note that I’m not even in America! Both people are engineers. One is an Albanian living in London and I can’t even compute how he’s so wired in to it all. They don’t even know each other but are lockstep with all the COVID stuff they say, now even on to the anti-vaxx angle.

I am american, but to be honest I don't quite know exactly what Q-Anon even is - I just never cared to read up on it I guess

As far as covid stuff I was basically unemployed for the first three months of the pandemic (only having a small workload) so I got super interested in reading white papers etc. you wouldn't believe the amount of absolutely terrible science that got pushed through the peer review process during covid. In another thread I detail a study someone used as evidence to support their opinion on asymptomatic thread.

The study was a model where they chose 75% asymptomatic spread relative to symptomatic spread for their model - the model unsurprisingly found asymp. spread to be roughly the same as symp. spread IIRC - now where did that 75% come from? I came from three studies they cite....2 of those 3 studies they cite do not have anything resembling the number they came up with. In one of the citations it was so bewilderingly wrong I can only conclude they cited the wrong study or they just made the number up entirely.

Back to the topic of PCR - I've seen zero literature to date that suggests a PCR with a CT>40 is beneficial. Further we have many studies that show false positives are absurdly high for many viruses well before CT40

So for someone to claim it's reasonable to use CT40, I believe the burden is on them to prove it since all literature I've seen suggests otherwise.

here's the garbage study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal

This is nonsense. The vast, vast majority of positive PCR tests are positive after < 30 cycles.

It may happen, also it is worth to notice that the immunity should form after the second vaccine

And it takes a few weeks after that second shot for full immunity to kick in. My vaccine details said two weeks after the second does for maximum immunity, but Moderna might be different.

And even then no vaccine is 100% effective in each and every individual. Without pre-vaccine tests it is also impossible to say whether or not a patient was already infected before getting the shot.

not true, the 2nd shot is for long-term immunity

tho the vaccination was less than ten days in the past, so it might not have been active yet

You are right, it seems that a lot of people develop antibodies after the first vaccine.

source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210114-covid-19-how-eff...

I can’t explain it either, just that it was confirmed in both cases by medical staff. She is pregnant, so they are extra careful.

the crucial bit of information is missing here.. we'll never get rid of covid, but was the second infection less severe than the initial one? or did both of those people have to visit the hospital twice

2nd much more severe, ongoing

This seems like one of those situations where we all need to be saying "The plural of anecdote is not data" on the rosary every morning.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that prior infection reduces your risk of future infection by 95%. That's a far sight better than most the vaccines, enough so that a 2nd infection would be noteworthy on a personal level. But then, since this is an Internet forum, we need to throw the law of large numbers at the situation. Those figures still mean that there are perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of people out there who are known to have caught it twice. Which then translates into a certainty that there will be quite a few people mentioning it as an interesting anecdote on public forums like this.

Then you throw a novelty effect on top of that. Say that prior infection actually confers 99% immunity. Fewer people will get re-infected, but each of those re-infections is more noteworthy, which makes it more likely that someone will want to talk about it. So the actual rate of re-infection and spread by people who've caught it gets a lot smaller, but the rate of people talking about it on the Internet, and the resulting perception people might infer of how likely it is, might stay about the same.

(Disclaimer: I do mean, "for the sake of argument." Until some firmer science on the subject is forthcoming, AFAIC it's still within the realm of possibility that prior infection doesn't confer much practical immunity at all. This study is promising, yes, but I've been around the block too many times to get all that excited over something that doesn't amount to a whole lot more than an in vitro study.)

its a young healthy couple, 2nd infection ongoing and much more severe

I didn't mean to minimize your friends' experience with a giant Skepty McSkepterson smackdown, and I apologize if that's how it came across. It sounds like it's an awful situation.

For the sake of clarification, I was more meaning to say, for the benefit of others, that we need to be cautious about extrapolating from stories like this. Because, where it's a global pandemic affecting 7 billion people all at once, even the unlikeliest of outcomes are guaranteed to happen. So we can't necessarily collect stories from a bunch of different individuals, connect the dots, and expect the result to be an accurate version of the big picture. Perhaps prior infection confers imperfect immunity, perhaps it confers none at all, perhaps it's better than any vaccine. I'm not sure we know yet, but I am pretty sure that your experience is compatible with all of those possibilities.

>I know two people who had covid and who right now have a second covid infection by the british mutation. One of them also had their first vaccination.

As of today, there are only 84 confirmed cases of reinfection worldwide, with three deaths. https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-t...

Published 9 months ago.

That's when the article was first published. As it states, it is updated twice a week. Look at the most recent entries.

If you had covid you also probably have a 1 in 10 chance of having long-covid for a year or more where your life quality is hell.

Lifetime antibodies are not very helpful if you have longterm or permanent damage from covid.

I don't want to trivialize what people are suffering through, but 1 in 10 is not a remotely accurate count.

> The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting.

Does it? I think this pop-science article overly simplifies antibodies and immunity...

I'm no doctor myself, but as was explained to me by my doctor friends (who however are not specialists in this subtopic either), there's many different layers to the immune system. It's entirely possible to have antibodies and/or antibody-producing capacity in your body, yet not be "immune" - if by "immune" we mean that you cannot get the illness, both in the sense that you don't get ill, and in the sense that you don't become asymptomatic carrier (i.e. the virus starts replicating in your body, but not enough to make you feel "ill" effects) (both of which are kind-of important if you want to stop a pandemic). Long-term immune system "memory cells" (B-cells) might still need time to be activate and start producing antibodies, so you can get infected, ill & a spreader, but not seriously ill because your immune system re-awakens and starts producing antibodies and you recover much quicker than you otherwise would. (This whole mechanism is the reason why you need booster shots of some vaccines.)

This is, of course, based mainly on experience from non-coronavirus like viruses. This one might be different.

I don't think _Nature_ is considered "Pop Science".

When they say thing you don't agree with it most certainly is.

> I don't think _Nature_ is considered "Pop Science".

Did you read the article? It isn't exactly "in depth". It isn't what I'd expect from a magazine of Nature's prominence.

Don't we also have many instances of people who have recovered and been reinfected months later? Some nurse friends said they had many coworkers who had been infected twice months apart with multiple negative tests between.

Pop-science article? This is Nature, one of the most respected science journals, and they have linked to the full peer-reviewed paper in their journal.

Besides, in contrast to your background of 'someone who has some mates who are doctors who once kind-of described it to him', the journal article in Nature was actually written by 13 PHD's who specialise in immunology.

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