[hattmall]

Unless they lockdown forever it's literally not going to matter. Additionally the longer they delay the acquisition of natural immunity the worse it will eventually be. The best course of action in the begining would have been to encourage only the vulnerable to isolate. Natural immunity is much better than the vaccines. COVID currently is worse for vaccinated people than it was for unvaccinated a year ago. The rate of severe infection with Delta among vaccinated is higher than the rate of severe infection of the general population a year ago with Original COVID. Natural immunity has less than 1% reinfection rate vs a nearly 40% infection rate for fully vaccinated. We talk about how all the current deaths of unvaccinated people could be prevented with vaccines, but skip that they could have also been prevented in 99% of cases by them simply catching COVID last year. Im all for vaccines and vaccine + COVID infection is currently the best protection, but that is an actually riskier proposition than simply having caught COVID in the begining for normal healthy people.

[zeku]

Last medical paper I read was using a cohort of 20,000 people. This paper concluded that natural covid immunity doesn't last forever. Median time to reinfection was 160+ days.

Is there new research or something? I keep seeing people talk about this and no one ever provides a source.

source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249642v...

Additionally here's a bunch of data that makes me doubt your point about naturally immunity being superior to vaccines:

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...

[peteradio]

Please tell me if my understanding is incorrect, I assert ....

That 160+ days seems to come entirely from the study window itself and I don't see how it would give an indication of general immunity of the study cohorts. If you wait longer as more people wind up infected that number only goes up.

To provide some additional context from the linked study, only 5.7 per 100,000 people were reinfected during the study window while 57.3 per 100,000 were infected for the first time. To put it into vaccine effectiveness terms that is a 90% effective. I didn't read to see if the cohorts were demographic matched.

If I'm understanding it correctly, then I think you misrepresent that 160 number.

[angelzen]

Appreciate your effort to link to sources. We fundamentally suffer from lack of data: what are the morbidity and mortality by age group, by comorbidity (obesity and diabetes), by unvax / unvax + covid / vax? Furthermore, being 'published' on medrxiv is not a guarantee for accuracy or reproducibility. Cue in the Ivermectin saga...

I wish CDC would actually collect basic epidemiological data, but it seems completely disorganized and able to perform simple functions. Is there some alternative source, perhaps in some other country?

[zeku]

Sure apologies for linking a preprint.

The study I linked earlier went on to be published in Lancet which is a super top tier medical journal. Here is the link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Also I find that the NHS over in England collects great data and personally I use them as a primary learning body for covid.

[angelzen]

Thank you!

[criticaltinker]

I'm with you on your general point - however you made some strong claims which are not supported by any literature I've seen (and I read a lot of literature on the topic, but of course I haven't read it all).

> Natural immunity is much better than the vaccines

The literature supports the fact that immunity acquired through natural infection is at least as effective as vaccination. I'm not aware of any strong evidence that one is better than the other in terms of individual health outcomes. It has been established that natural infection induces an immune response that includes nucleocapsid protein antibodies whereas vaccination with the current mRNA formulations does not. There are other subtle differences in the immune response, and those may have a significant long-term impact on both individual health outcomes and viral evolution at a population level, but scientific evidence on those points is extremely limited.

> The rate of severe infection with Delta among vaccinated is higher than the rate of severe infection of the general population a year ago with Original COVID

> Natural immunity has less than 1% reinfection rate vs a nearly 40% infection rate for fully vaccinated

I'm all for challenging the status quo but folks really need to start citing primary sources to support such claims, otherwise they will be dismissed as uninformed opinion.

[zeku]

Looks like we responded to him in basically the same way at the same time. I had a check of his profile and he has a comment claiming that: "

hattmall 16 days ago | parent [–] | on: Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patr...

All evidence shows it to be the other way around, the vaccinated are far more dangerous to the unvaccinated than vice versa, it isn't even close. Leaky vaccines create more virulent and deadlier viruses in the unvaccinated.

"

Looks like he is just an antivaxxer spreading unscientific lies.

[criticaltinker]

> he is just an antivaxxer spreading unscientific lies

No need for ad hominem rebuttals here.

The threat of vaccine resistance is real and acknowledged by many experts [1][2], but I agree he is not doing these ideas justice by making such simple and unbalanced comments without citing any primary sources.

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[2] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...

[angelzen]

Recently in the news: "Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla says that a vaccine-resistant COVID variant will “likely” emerge.", while touting that his company can design a new vaccine in 95 days when the dreaded variant arises.

https://www.insider.com/pfizer-ceo-vaccine-resistant-coronav...

[zeku]

It won't let me reply to this "criticalthinker" guy anymore, but I will post this for anyone looking at this before they get sucked into these purposeful lies.

Just go read what he linked me to supposedly support his argument:

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

This paper states that covid will mutate due to "neutral variation" and evade the vaccine. This isn't a point against the vaccine, this is just stating the obvious that eventually we will need a different vaccine. The paper also recommends a combination of vaccination and therapeutics. "trategies for viral elimination should therefore be diversified across molecular targets and therapeutic modalities. "

They then go on to disclose that the authors have ownership in a therapeutics company.

[2]The second link he provided also recommends that we receive booster shots and again doesn't support the anti vax argument. Go actually read it if you want. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...

These people are grifting.

[criticaltinker]

So I say "The threat of vaccine resistance is real and acknowledged by many experts" and provide citations to support this claim - then you reply:

> This isn't a point against the vaccine [...] and doesn't support the anti vax argument

You're attacking a straw man with an overly simplistic reductionist interpretation. I'm not "against the vaccine", but clearly your bias here is to defend vaccination and disregard any nuanced criticisms from experts at top institutions as "anti-vax".

I won't continue to discuss this with you because it's obvious you don't intend to cultivate an informed discussion.