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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

Cross-reference it to https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vac...

I suspect we have the deadlier variants not despite, but because we are vaccinating and the vaccination is not effective in preventing spread.

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Why do you think that? The Alpha and Delta variants were both first detected in late 2020 - before the vaccines were widely available.

How can i make a statement weaker and more open ended than with "i suspect"? "Could it be"? I didn't even wanted to back it up, it was more intended as an open thought, but its seems it didn't get across in the heat of the thread.

That assumption is based on the belief that an infection prevents reinfection, i.e. an infection is just as good at protecting a (recovered) patient as a vaccine is at protecting an uninfected person.

But we have seen that Delta reinfects previously infected patients, ergo, an infection is at a best a leaky vaccine (ie as good as current vaccines, though there are indications that it is not [1]), and at worse, a catalyst to worse outcomes considering the danger done during previous infection, b) a vaccine is not offered to the previously infected, c) the effects of long term covid.

[1] https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...

But people that have been vaccinated have also been infected. Why would you call it a leaky vaccine when the vaccine leaks too? Or am I mistaken here?

I didn't mean to imply that the vaccines we use aren't leaky, they are. Even so, there are indications that getting the vaccine provides more effective defense than getting infected [1].

[1] https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...

For some reason, I misread that to be "https://dictatorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...".. and then I realized that I was right after all.

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