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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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