[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/