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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

This was suspected early on in the pandemic. Before the vaccine was FDA approved I publicly wondered if we could just give people one of these "colds" that protects against COVID-19. My doctor friends said that would never pass any ethics board. I also suspect there would not be a good way for pharmaceutical companies to make any money on this more natural approach. Today the future looks like a carousel ride of booster shots and people are wearing masks again. My person approach, which would never be endorsed by public health officials, is to be fully vaccinated, not wear a mask and be in close proximity to people in the hope to get a breakthrough case of COVID-19. I want a mild case to build natural immunity, which studies show provides better immunity than vaccines, and get off a booster shot carousel and put COVID-19 behind me.

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The big problem with any deliberate-inoculation strategy: dosage.

In the vaccination you received, there was a controlled dosage of the active ingredient. This had been tested in thousands of people and is known to give a certain amount of immune response and an acceptable amount of side effects.

When you get have contact with someone who is infectious there is a huge variation in how much viral load they might have and how much they shed. So the first person you mean might only "gift" you a tiny dose that doesn't improve your post-vaccination immunity much at all. The next day you might meet a super contagious person, get basically drenched in viral particles, and then have a breakthrough case that makes you sick for weeks.

It's the sort of "clever hack" that probably sounds appealing to a lot of software engineers but is a terrible public health plan.

What you're proposing is pretty much how the first vaccine was invented. (Jenner gave people cow pocks because that created immunity against the much more severe small pocks.)

That was great at the time, but today's vaccines are just a much better and more targetted way of creating immunity.

Having everyone have a common cold whole year round (we would have to get infected with new strains every few days) seems like 10x worse then just ignoring the pandemic and letting everyone get covid

You're immune system would wipe out covid pretty fast if you had a cold year round. Iga was shown early as one of the most immediate responders that kills covid. in fact that's what our vaccine is trying to get your body to coax out when it sees the spike protein.

If you are under 60 and not in a vulnerable group and got two shots you are already done. Biontech/Moderna both offer pretty good protection against getting seriously ill.

So no need to get Covid the "natural way". If you are fully vaccinated, you are fully vaccinated. As long as there is no new escape variant you are fine already.

The third shot might be pretty optional for young people, we will have to see. Still even if necessary, it is not like you have to get a shot every week, the third will probably last much longer.

> I want a mild case to build natural immunity, which studies show provides better immunity than vaccines.

Do you have a source for this? I feel like many articles/studies I've read state the opposite, i.e., vaccine immunity > natural immunity.

You might still get COVID every year then, or get various strains per year, like the flu. So COVID-19 won't be "behind you", but "with you forever <3".

silly life; always finding ways~

That was my hope too- unfortunately I don't live alone so can't go out and do it. And it probably is smarter to do what we can to avoid it as we still don't really understand the long-term effects of this nasty virus, just that it can have some bad ones for some people.

A $20 injection for 70% (for now) of about 8B people is around $100B which no longer carries any legal risk. That’s a lot of incentive to overcome.

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