| I don't know enough about immunology to say whether "binding more broadly" confers more immunity or not. It would certainly go against prior knowledge about human immune responses for a single spike protein (vaccine) to elicit a greater immune response than _the actual virus_. That CDC study is so bad I'm surprised they had the gall to publish it with the conclusion they did. Testing positive says nothing about severity of infection. > were about five times more likely to test positive for the infection than people who had been vaccinated Testing positive is not a very good metric. Were they hospitalized? Was it severe? Did they even get sick, or just test positive? They even admit to a sampling flaw in the discussion: > Second, persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated. The best study on this so far is from Israel with a much larger sample in a highly vaccinated country. Here's a Harvard doctor discussing the contradictory studies. https://brownstone.org/articles/a-review-and-autopsy-of-two-... > For a low-risk person, which includes most people with natural immunity, a 35% risk reduction is more marginal in terms of absolute risk. > Based on the solid evidence from the Israeli study, the Covid recovered have stronger and longer-lasting immunity against Covid disease than the vaccinated. Hence, there is no reason to prevent them from activities that are permitted to the vaccinated. In fact, it is discriminatory. |
"It's important to realize, though, that all immune responses to a viral infection generate a mixture of neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. That's one of the things about the immune system - it revs up production of a wide variety of antibodies, selected from the untold billions of them circulating around in your bloodstream. Some of them bind to one part of the pathogen, and some to another. And they bind in different conformations, sticking to different parts of the surface of the invading virus from different directions."
It is conceivable that a targeted vaccine is more effective at shutting down an infection than natural immunity by focusing the immune system to produce a narrow band of very effective antibodies. The tradeoff is that a virus mutation can create a catastrophic situation where the same antibodies are less effective, possibly having negative efficiency enhancing the infection. The risk is amplified by vaccinating the entire population with the exact same protein sequence, creating hundreds of millions of living incubators for the virus to learn how to evade the narrow antibody response.
We are creating a biological landscape prone to black swan events. Good luck convincing any total vaxer that this is a very real risk. They will laugh and sneer and maybe call you criminal because obviously the data shows the vaccines are safe and effective. "Hahaha, I've been told that we're all going to be dead by now, look at those peddling conspiracy theories." Just like the Wall Street crowd created the run-up to the 2008 crisis. Who could have possibly predicted that CDOs were prone to a black swan?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/antibody-dependent...