Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by restingrobot 1606 days ago
>requiring vaccination instead

Why not natural immunity instead?

2 comments

Natural immunity from which strain and how long ago? Does someone who recovered from the original strain 18 months ago have comparable protection to someone who recovered from Omicron yesterday? Or someone who has been vaccinated? We do not know these answers.

What we do know - based on mountains of data - is that vaccinated people take up hospital beds far, far less often than unvaccinated people.

>Natural immunity from which strain and how long ago?

Doesn't matter. If you have already take the vaccines, it is my opinion that it is better to get the omicron variant and have natural immunity, (unless of course you are particularly vulnerable).

Your point that vaccinated people take up less beds is exactly right. Omicron is a highly contagious, weak strain and would provide and amazing opportunity for mass natural immunity, without the fear of hospitalization and death.

"without the fear of hospitalization and death."

Except for the 2,000 Americans dying from COVID each and every day, and the various hospitals that are at capacity.

"let god sort em out" is just eugenics.
>"let god sort em out" is just eugenics.

LOL its not eugenics, its the same for every other infectious disease without a vaccine. Everyone will get omicron/some variant at some point.

But we have a vaccine.
Not for omicron, or the next variant, or the one after that. At some point we have to face reality, and no it is not eugenics, it called "life".
We do have several vaccines for Omicron. They are the existing COVID vaccines. They aren't as effective as they were against prior variants, but they're still more effective than e.g. flu vaccines, which save many lives each year.

Note that I don't agree with the eugenics comments, but this misinformation about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines is getting out of hand.

>but this misinformation about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines is getting out of hand.

Nothing I stated is misinformation. The the current vaccines are not effective at preventing the spread of omicron. So to say that the best approach, if you are already vaccinated, is to just get virus, is not a stretch. The same can apply to any future, (weak), variants as well.

But it doesn't work (well enough) to matter.
It's still really good at reducing hospitalization & death rates, anyway. That's not nothing.

Does seem to be nearly useless at preventing symptomatic Omicron, though. Just makes it, on average, much less awful.