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Comment by km3r | Hacker News Reader

> the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike

Haven't heard of this before, care to elaborate?

> the massive amount of propaganda and outright coercion that everyone (at least in the US) has been exposed to over the last several months

See idk if propaganda is the right word here. Imagine a world were covid was 20x as deadily, and the vaccine had absolutely zero side effects. How else do you get the message put to get it? Just say nothing? If hospitals are at risk of getting overrun, and unlike lockdowns, vaccines actually make differences in case numbers, the government has an obligation to do something (protect the general welfare clearly is a mandate to prevent overrunning healthcare facilities).

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By making everyone's immune system respond in the same way, you're making it more likely that if the virus escapes (mutates in a way that evades the immune system, by modifying its spike protein), then it will escape completely (for everyone vaccinated by mRNA vaccines).

The hope is that by doing that, the virus would also lose the local optimum of the current spike protein, and become much less infectious.

The alternative is, with "natural" immunity, you generate a much more diverse immune response across the population.

I think that you could have made that case if we had a vaccine in April 2020, but by now US has 30-50% of its population with natural immunity. Additionally, the spike protein is the least likely mutation to enable escaping, as it both has to modify to be different enough from the original, plus somehow still be able to attach onto our cells with similar level of infectiousness. Thats why they choose to vaccinate against the spike protein vs any other part of the virus. None of the variants at the moment seem to be a concern for escaping the spike protein, with a billion vaccinations and a billion infections. We are literally running out of chances for that to happen.

There also remains enough spread now that vaccinated people are getting mini boosts of natural immunity. Israel has some great data on the combination of various number of doses and natural immunity, and the combo is very strong.

That being said, I don't know your medical history. I am a strong supporter of accepting natural immunity in lieu of a vaccine. But even so, that fear of escape isn't made worse by a naturally immune person getting vaccinated, as they already have the non-spike protein defenses.

> Israel has some great data on the combination of various number of doses and natural immunity, and the combo is very strong.

https://pastebin.com/8yR3y5NA

The best study on this actually found no significant difference when giving a single shot to those who were naturally immune. Which makes sense because the chance of reinfection is so incredibly tiny that even if the shot completely eliminated the chance of getting COVID, the absolute size of the effect is still going to be quite small.

> Additionally, the spike protein is the least likely mutation to enable escaping, as it both has to modify to be different enough from the original, plus somehow still be able to attach onto our cells with similar level of infectiousness.

But you don't have to choose just one part. You could have an inactivated whole virus vaccine. That avoids the whole issue.

FWIW we are already seeing point mutations on the spike developing. That's probably why Delta is so damn good at spreading, right? The Israel data suggests a VE of ~39% against Delta. I personally don't believe Pfizer's original 95% VE number, but if you do, that's a startling drop.

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