[fivea]

> As GP states, they engaged in "noble lies" in order to drive vaccine adoption.

Can you point out what was in your opinion the best example of what you described as "noble lie"?

I've seen people throwing baseless accusations by misrepresenting basic guidances, such as how avoiding scarcity of personal safety equipment like latex gloves and surgical masks in hospitals was distorted into "first they state masks don't work but now they flipflop into arguing they do".

Thus, to avoid personal subjective takes and keep this discussion on the facts, what exactly do you see as the best example of this "noble lie"?

[disambiguation]

Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time.

Many countries acknowledge it as a valid alternative to the vaccine. But not the USA. There has been no change in policy. Not even a public acknowledgment, let alone an apology for getting it wrong.

Is this out of ignorance? malice? Neither, it's simply pragmatic.

Reliably testing for prior infections at population scale would be really slow, expensive, and faulty. Further there's no real downside to vaccinating someone with a prior infection (slightly higher incidence of side effects notwithstanding).

Further, people will lose the urgency to get the vaccine if they think they have antibodies.

Monolithic policy is cheaper than nuanced policy, and monolithic policy only works if its dead simple. So, better to have everyone believe the vaccine is the one and only solution than to actually concern themselves with the truth.

There are also many examples of "verbatim" lies, such as these:

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.

[fivea]

> Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time.

What exactly do you mean by "works"?

I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.

But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it?

The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of a real infection. So that the odds you die from COVID are lower, if not residual.

Consequently, we see the bulk of all deaths from COVID comprised of unvaccinated individuals.

But other than all the dead, those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.

Is that what you mean by "Natural immunity works"? That if you ignore all those unvaccinated people who died then the ones that lived through a COVID infection didn't died?

Because the whole point of a vaccine is that people don't have to die from a preventable disease, isn't it?

[disambiguation]

Case in point: communicating nuance is hard when no one wants to hear it!

Let me make it easy:

1. majority of infections happened pre-vaccine rollout.

2. we created a system that locked people out based on vaccine status.

3. the system should have included those with natural immunity.

/q

[fivea]

> Case in point: communicating nuance is hard when no one wants to hear it!

There is no nuance. The message couldn't be clearer: if you take the vaccine then the odds you'll die from COVID are way lower than if you do not.

And reality does not lie: the bulk of COVID deaths come from unvaccinated people.

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/scicheck-covid-19-data-com...

Enough with all this misinformed or disinformed bullshit.

[slibhb]

You've chosen not to address the (very clear) point made by the previous poster. Instead you retreat to familiar talking points. Genuinely disturbing to witness an interaction like this.

[disambiguation]

What did I say that was misinformation?

> it's well established that those who contract COVID .. will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.

> those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.

It seems like we're on the same page here.

[jjeaff]

There is more nuance in your fact that a person who survives a COVID infection has immunity. That nuance is that most people who think they were infected actually did not ever get tested. Additionally, testing for previous infection takes more time and is more costly and adds additional complexity to the cheaper and simpler one step plan of "just go get vaccinated".

[bradknowles]

Natural immunity will only work if the virus doesn't mutate quickly, and what your immune system learns about the virus can be applied to future infections.

The former is clearly not true with regards to COVID. That is why we have been having waves of high infection rates, as the new variants get quickly distributed widely.

[LorenPechtel]

Natural immunity works?

Have you seen how bad Sweden's numbers were? It was vaunted as a story of the success of let it rip approach, but the end result was to show the failure of the let it rip approach.

And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed. The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.

[nradov]

Actually Sweden's numbers are quite good, better than many other EU countries which took more restrictive approaches.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

The immune system doesn't "lock onto“ part of the virus. That's just misinformation and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the adaptive immune system works.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

[fivea]

> Actually Sweden's numbers are quite good, better than many other EU countries which took more restrictive approaches.

Reality does not agree with you.

Sweden fared rather poorly when compared with comparable countries such as Norway, Finland, or Denmark.

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/

There is no way around it: Sweden had more covid-related deaths than Norway, Finland, and Denmark bundled together.

Denmark had 500k more cases than Sweden, but only endured a quarter of Sweden's death count.

This does not fit the definition of "quite good". These are awful numbers. Awful numbers that were easily avoidable if Sweden followed the example of any of its neighbors.

[disambiguation]

I made no mention of Sweden and have no idea what that has to do with natural immunity given their vaccination rate is 75% and their death rate is comparable to Germany and France. [0] [1]

> And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed.

You've got it exactly backwards. The vaccine uses only a part of the S-protein, whereas a natural infection exposes the body to the full S-protein and N-protein. In theory and in practice, the immune system can train on more viral features via natural infection than it can via vaccine.

> The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.

It really doesn't. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

> We present a systematic review and pooled analysis of clinical studies to date that (1) specifically compare the protection of natural immunity in the COVID-recovered versus the efficacy of complete vaccination in the COVID-naive ... it supports the pooled findings in finding superiority of natural immunity over-vaccination ... Consequently, no study could conclude the superiority of vaccination protection over natural immunity with statistical confidence, but observational studies endorsed an advantage for protection by natural immunity. [7]

[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/sweden_coronavirus_full_vacci...

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34089610/

[3] https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-75...

[5] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...

[6] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8627252/