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Given that immunity from infection is currently questionable your suggestion doesn't make sense. The reason the findings mentioned in this article are important
by celticninja 6y ago
Given that immunity from infection is currently questionable your suggestion doesn't make sense. The reason the findings mentioned in this article are important is because the immune response seems to be stronger than that seen in people that have been infected and recovered. So this vaccine would be better at creating herd immunity than just allowing everyone to get infected. At the same time vaccinations will have a reduced impact on people than actually catching the virus would.
There is a difference between the level of illness experienced by those who are vaccinated Vs those who get infected, so more old people will die as a result of infection than would die as a result of vaccination.
So no, it would not be better for healthy adults and kids to get it in Q2 2020. Also how do you propose that you only infect the healthy adults and kids?
- rimliu 6y agoHow is immunity from infection questionable? We had 43 million cases and about a dozen or so reinfections. Not sure if confirmed reinfections reach the double digits yet.
- graeme 6y agoSo studies of other coronaviruses show immunity lasted 6-12 months. We’re a but early to see mass reinfections. That said, my guess would be normal reinfections would be less severe, more like a cold. There have been some severe reinfections but any reinfection under six months suggests something atypical in the immune response. Also SARS-Cov-1 produced a longer immune response so that may happen here. But lifelong sterilizing immunity seems pretty unlikely based on what we know so far. The vaccines aren’t aiming at sterilizing immunity actually, their goal is to greatly lower the severity of the infection.
- celticninja 6y agoRead the papers on it, antibody tests in people who have previously tested positive for covid have found little or no antibodies in tests taken 3 months after infection. So it appears as if there is a limited/short term immunity after initial infection. The vaccine appears to produce a much stronger immune response, such that antibodies can be identified in tests some time after the vaccination. You can get limited immunity from the common cold after being infected but you are just as likely to catch it 12 months later anyway. With covid that means we are dealing with it annually, which our health services cannot keep up with.
- rimliu 6y agoThere are more immune mechanizms beside antibodies (T-cells, B-cells). For the common cold there are different viruses, so you may get a cold caused by different ones.
- dtech 6y agoantibodies disapear quickly, but the B-memory cells that produce them are still in the body ready to be mobilized. "Common cold" and "flu" is not 1 virus, but hundreds of different viruses which is why you get them repeatedly. You do build immunity though. It's why children always have a cold and adults a lot less common.
- celticninja 6y agohttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54696873 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54696873
- celticninja 6y agohttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54696873 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54696873
- cheph 6y ago> Given that immunity from infection is currently questionable your suggestion doesn't make sense. If you can't get immunity from the infection, how will the vaccine work?
- regularfry 6y agoWe don't know if it does yet. We know it causes an immune response. We don't know if that stops you from catching it, and we don't know if it stops you from being infectious. It tips the scales in that direction, and all we really need is for it to be effective enough to drop R0 low enough that coupling it with reasonable restrictions makes the virus go away, which is why it's worth pursuing, but that's a different goal to ensuring you can't catch it at all.