Omicron is trouncing the argument for “natural immunity” to Covid

arstechnica.com

13 points·dev_tty01··4 comments

This is a very misleading headline. The data actually shows that the level of neutralizing antibodies for Omicron in both vaccinated and non-vaccinated with previous Covid exposure is similar (panel D), while not been exposed or vaccinated is much worse. So, yes, it does make a difference if you are unvaccinated and have already caught Covid, almost the same level of protection as if you were vaccinated. Plus, this is an in vitro study done with 59 people, so we absolutely should not draw strong conclusions from it.

Disclaimer: I took three vaccine doses.

You're missing the point. Look at panel B again: People who only had Omicron Covid have close to no immunity to any of the previous variants. That's the important part: Getting infected with only the omicron variant leaves you susceptible to a later infection with delta.

Panel D only shows that infection with an older variant in combination with a later omicron infection has a similar effect to a vaccine combined with an omicron infection.

So the assertion in the title still stands: The idea of not getting vaccinated and instead hoping for an omicron infection to gain "natural immunity" is unrealistic because you won't gain any noteworthy immunity to anything other than omicron

I quote: "Therefore, unvaccinated persons who are infected with the omicron BA.1 variant only (without previous SARS-CoV-2 infection) might not be sufficiently protected against infection with a SARS-CoV-2 variant other than omicron BA.1; for full protection, vaccination is warranted."

But the other variants are gone. Virtually nobody in the US and Europe are getting infected with them, as we can see with sequencing data.

>"study done with 59 people"

Well that's not a study at all. Next.

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