[michaelmrose]

> There are many many people who have confirmed positive COVID tests. At least excuse those.

The virus is a moving target and what was true of the alpha variant may not be true of delta or downstream. I guess it depends on what you mean by excuse. If you mean allow people to say go on a cruise with a positive covid test as opposed to a vaccination record that seems tentatively reasonable. If you mean allow workers at an old folks home to opt out based on a prior positive test that is unreasonable. If it makes you even possibly slightly less likely to kill the old folks you should get the jab.

The real problem is the grey area created by such a rule. There are probably multiple times as many people who think they have had covid compared to those that have actually had covid that have never been tested. I know people in the US who had an illness in 2019 who are sure they had covid. If you give them an opening they wont let it go. It will surely get ugly.

[reducesuffering]

If folks can't produce a confirmed positive covid test or antibody test, then they can effectively be treated as unprotected because there's no evidence they have protection, that's fine.

> If you mean allow workers at an old folks home to opt out based on a prior positive test that is unreasonable. If it makes you even possibly slightly less likely to kill the old folks you should get the jab.

Where is the line drawn? Maybe it would be more effective for people with 2 doses to get a third? What science is there showing antibodies + 1 shot is more marginal protection than 3 shots?

[michaelmrose]

It should be drawn where it's safe to draw it based on current knowledge.

I don't believe that it's firmly established that natural immunity is as good as 2 shots or natural immunity + 1 shot.

We bought more than enough doses to vaccinate everyone and downsides are small.

Consider a population of 10 million with natural immunity. Let us suppose that vaccination with Pfizer will kill between 0 and 1.

Suppose that 1% would fall ill and 1% of those die. That is 1000 preventable deaths.

It needn't be very much of a difference just 1/100th of 1% to vastly outweigh the risk of a very safe vaccine.