Comment by revolvingocelot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revolvingocelot | Hacker News Reader

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revolvingocelot

>I’d rather have robust variety of antibodies provided by prior infection than get a leaky vaccine every 8 months. Sucks that I’m going to lose my job for that decision but having a IaaS (Immunity as a Service) subscription from Pharma sounds worse than getting longcovid again.

Er, what? It sounds like you're saying that you'd rather get COVID-resistance from a bout with COVID rather than from a vaccine, but then you suggest that you've already had COVID and that you'd prefer to experience COVID complications again.

The suspicious doubletalk aside, aren't the double-vaxxed currently doomed to risk a (mild, potentially infectious) Delta experience anyway? How's the resistance gained thereby stack up?

Why's this an issue, anyway? Are you having to pay for your shots, or something? Or is this a "principled" stance?

edit: probable answers to the personal questions I have of the parent can be found in this thread of theirs a few days ago. If the events of the past year and a half weren't enough to make any readers worried about trust in social institutions, reading this will: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27986681

He's saying he'd rather depend on his natural immunity than be mandatorily jabbed over and over again.

What natural immunity? He implies that he's already got two vaccine shots, and would rather lose his job than get a third...

Will his vaccine-induced resistance to the virus result in a more robust protection, after the immune system successfully fights off the Delta infection he'll surely eventually get? Or will the immunity fade, leaving him at an unvaccinated-like risk some time in the future? Given the chance of the latter, and given that he's likely already gotten two, I just don't understand the logic -- unless one's willing to venture into slightly paranoid territory, as I note above.

I didn't get any shots. I had longcovid from Mar 2020 - Jun 2021.

I think having the shot will ruin my robust immunity. If you train your immune system to create very specific antibodies to one part of the virus, that is already being evaded by breakthrough infections btw - you will be more susceptible to variants. Anyone who had covid and takes this vaccine is ruining their existing immunity IMO - but people can do what they want, just don't force it on me.

> Anyone who had covid and takes this vaccine is ruining their existing immunity IMO

"Ruining" may be too strong a word but something like this has already been observed with the second Pfizer dose: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1

I note that the parent doesn't attempt to provide a summary. I'm no immunologist but it seems to me that this study examines a third-order consequence (levels of IFN-gamma in whole blood samples) to infer a second-level consequence (levels of CD4 helper and CD8 cytotoxic T-cells, which are secreting the IFN-gamma), which is presumed to be indicative of a root-level occurance ("a detrimental effect in the overall magnitude of the spike-specific humoral response in COVID-19 recovered individuals"). It's not clear to me how the second order consequence clearly implies the root-level occurance.

This [0] is the paper in the fifth citation from the parent's article. It seems to come to similiar conclusions, but, like the parent's article, doesn't assess any real world data, just lab conditions and inferences.

I urge everyone reading this to remind themselves of the specific language used in these articles -- they don't actually know whether these correlates they're observing are affecting immunity, just one component of what we consider to be a single aspect of an appropriate immune response in a blood sample.

Does my linked article, above and in a different thread, also measure blood sample conditions? Absolutely. But the article I linked directly analyses (spike protein) antibody levels -- an appropriate immune response in a blood sample -- while the articles here examine inferred T cell presence. One is a direct measure of something straightforward, and the other an inferential examination of something complex.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7885942.1/

In reality we have no "real world data" and know very little about what the effects will be of piling Covid vaccinations on top of immunity from a prior infection, because it was never studied before pushing the shots to everyone including the Covid-recovered (who were explicitly excluded from the trials). Obviously spike protein antibodies are not the be-all and end-all of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, or we would not be observing relatively robust immunity even among recovered individuals who've had their antibody levels wane.

>the Covid-recovered (who were explicitly excluded from the trials)

Excluding these people from the initial trials makes perfect sense to me. The various understood complications of COVID, like blood clots or minor strokes, could have been mistaken for consequences of vaccination.

Why do you suppose that there aren't any papers being generated on the topic of the recovered-from-COVID who get vaccines?

>Obviously spike protein antibodies are not the be-all and end-all of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, or we would not be observing relatively robust immunity even among recovered individuals who've had their antibody levels wane

No, but serum antibody levels against the methods viruses use to hijack our cells is a long, storied, well-understood and widely-accepted means of assessing overall systemic immune response to whatever the antibodies are against, in a way that third-order inferences about T cells aren't.

I appreciate your judicious use of "I think" and "IMO". I don't think that you have much justification to think that way about your natural immunity.

For whatever it's worth, this preprint [0] suggests that your immunity, caused by a COVID infection, and my immunity, caused by two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, are similar, and have similar durations of functional protection. Note that, for both our cases, durable protection against Alpha and Delta was found after one year (but, interestingly, not against the dying variants Beta and Gamma).

I hope that you'll be willing to get the vaccine. I've experienced long term medical complications from something unrelated to COVID, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to risk something like long COVID, especially someone who's already had it.

[0] NB that I've linked to the second version uploaded https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.12.21261951v...

That's a really good question I'd like the answer to. I was reading that natural infection tends to create a stronger response against the nucleocapsid for t-cells.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.19.21255739v...

Is this an either or thing? Will your immune system develop proper full immunity after getting vaccine + delta ?

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