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Comment by ultralite | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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