Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity | Hacker News Reader

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity

medrxiv.org

9 pointshuntermeyer8 comments

This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.

I'm coming to believe that the best reason to get vaccinated is so that when (not if) you get infected with covid-19, the symptoms are likely to be milder. This was the original goal, but then when the mRNA vaccines had such unexpectedly high effectiveness the goalposts got moved to "keep me from ever getting it". Time to move the goalposts back to where they were before. Most of us are going to get infected. It's better if you're vaccinated first.

Not "most". "All". Think of it like this: we all have common cold. Most people have it 3-5 times a year, 20% of it is caused by coronaviruses. COVID is just a _novel_ coronavirus. Once you're vaccinated (or had COVID) it's not novel anymore. Moreover, it's never going away. Furthermore, according to CDC's own estimates of burden (search for "covid burden") over 120M people in the US already had COVID. So our efforts to "stop covid" seem to have done bupkis to actually stop it in any way.

...and the estimate of 120M people was as of the end of May, IIRC, so we can assume that the Delta surge has added substantially to it.

Current CDC estimate of the multiplier is 4.2, and official count of PCR positive tests is 39M, which makes about 164M, just under half the population.

Do we really get to 100% for most coronavirus colds, though? I didn't think that was true. Definitely well over half, though.

Whether we want to or not, that's where we'll inevitably end up, if not now than a year from now. The only way out is through. Except now you have a choice of wearing body armor (vaccine) or not.

I remember the goalpost moving differently. Before these studies the official opinion was that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity and people that had an infection should get the vaccine nonetheless. I think that got cleared up now.

People that had an infection should get the vaccine nonetheless according to this study:

"Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant."

Previous discussion from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28307224 (263 comments)

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