6 ms·

Not necessarily [1]. COVID vaccines particularly give you far higher neutralization titers than a prior infection. [1] A glaring counterexample to your hypothe

by b0sk 5y ago

Not necessarily [1]. COVID vaccines particularly give you far higher neutralization titers than a prior infection. [1] A glaring counterexample to your hypothesis is Brazil (Manuas) where prior infections (as high as 60%) didn't stop the P1 variant from ripping through.

petertodd 5y ago
> COVID vaccines particularly give you far higher neutralization titers than a prior infection. Do you have a source for that?
- icedchai 5y ago
  Here's one: https://www.contagionlive.com/view/immune-response-from-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-is-more-robust-than-natural-infection https://www.contagionlive.com/view/immune-response-from-mrna...
  - petertodd 5y ago
    The study itself says that the immune response to the vaccine is not as diverse as a natural infection. That's how the study tried to figure out who had been infected: "Natural exposure induces a dominant Ab response against the nucleocapsid protein (NP), but since NP is not in the vaccine, there is no vaccine induced response against it. In this way vaccinated people who had a prior natural exposure can be classified because they have Abs to NP." Simply looking at one aspect of immunity - detectable antibodies in the blood - is a very incomplete way of looking at the overall level of protection. For example, it's well known that mucosal immunity is important, and injected vaccines have a hard time inducing that kind of immunity: https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has-a-better-shot-at-ending-the-pandemic/589821/ https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has-... It's also concerning that there is evidence that while people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to be infected. If they do get infected, they are more likely to be infected with one of the variants than unvaccinated: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA728463 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA728463 The immune response developed to our vaccines is quite specific - they only generate the spike protein - which leads to a much less diverse response than a natural infection. Finally, the study you quoted can't really compare apples to apples anyway, as it's defining prior infection as simply having some level of antibody response, without considering how mild or severe those infections actually were.
    - amluto 5y ago
      > Simply looking at one aspect of immunity - detectable antibodies in the blood - is a very incomplete way of looking at the overall level of protection. For example, it's well known that mucosal immunity is important, and injected vaccines have a hard time inducing that kind of immunity: https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has- https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has-... I have not seen an actual credible claim that injectable vaccines can’t produce mucosal immunity. IIRC the HPV vaccines seem to generate strongly protective mucosal immunity. The opinion piece you linked seems off, too: the mRNA vaccines and (possibly to a lesser extent) the viral vector vaccines do seem to prevent most infections. But it’s definitely true that antibodies in the blood are an incomplete picture. There are also memory B cell and all kinds of T cells.
    - nerbert 5y ago
      The spike protein is what is in common between all the variants. Getting a more diverse response doesn’t mean better protection.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      High NAbs titers in the blood against spike will almost certainly be protective and even in the absence of sterilizing mucosal immunity will confine any infection to the upper respiratory tract. I'm nowhere near as concerned about a variant infecting my upper respiratory tract as I am with being unvaccinated and having any of the variants attack my heart, kidneys, lungs and blood. The use of spike was also not a mistake. Attempts to produce vaccines against NP for SARS-CoV-1 produced signs of ADE, so that is why everyone is using spike-only (other than the few inactivated virus vaccines).
    - timr 5y ago
      > It's also concerning that there is evidence that while people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to be infected. If they do get infected, they are more likely to be infected with one of the variants than unvaccinated That's not "concerning"...it's a truism. You've made those people immune to the wild-type strain. If they're going to get infected, it's going to be to a variant. You're still missing the denominator (i.e. how often does it happen?) and the most important question: how serious is it when they do get infected? So far, the answers are "not often", and "not serious", respectively.
bpodgursky 5y ago
> glaring counterexample to your hypothesis is Brazil (Manuas) where prior infections (as high as 60%) didn't stop the P1 variant from ripping through This says nothing about the strength of a previous infection. It very plausibly just says that R > 1.7, ie it is infecting the remaining 40%.
- b0sk 5y ago
  are you sure about the infecting the remaining 40%. In every article I read, they specifically mention re-infections in many cases.
timr 5y ago
> [1] A glaring counterexample to your hypothesis is Brazil (Manuas) where prior infections (as high as 60%) didn't stop the P1 variant from ripping through. The prior infection estimates for Manaus were simply wrong. They were based on a paper that "adjusted" the observed seroprevalence rates upward by a factor of ~3x. The parsimonious conclusion is that these corrections were too aggressive and ended up over-estimating infections. See Figure 2a in the paper, here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33293339/#&gid=article-figures&pid=fig-2-uid-1 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33293339/#&gid=article-figur... It is a "glaring" example only of how the low editorial standards of major journals during this pandemic has led to a wave of confusion amongst the public.
- petertodd 5y ago
  Conversely, we can make the same argument in the opposite direction with the example of Seychelles, which in spite of the highest vaccination level in the world, is still seeing significant growth in cases: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56992121 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56992121 Apparently they're using 40% Astra Zeneca, 60% Sinopharm; hopefully the issue is simply the latter being ineffective. But as all the success stories with vaccination have also had very significant numbers of deaths with covid, we may need significant levels of natural immunity in conjunction with vaccine immunity to actually get cases to decline.
  - TheGigaChad 5y ago
    The Seychelles are using Chinese junk.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    I don't see how anywhere could get to count as a "success story with vaccination" under your criteria while also not having "significant numbers of deaths with covid" and so I don't think you end up with a meaningful observation. New Zealand had zero community cases without vaccination, during 2021 its vaccination programme has only covered some front line workers and very high risk people, and it still has zero community cases. Is that "success"? Is it "not success" ? How would you tell? Whereas in my own country about two thirds of adults have had at least one jab, but still people are dying every single day from COVID-19, just much fewer than an the height of the pandemic here. Is that a success? Not a success? One of the reasons New Zealand was so slow? With zero cases they had no reason to do Emergency Authorization. So they didn't. The Pfizer vaccine they picked got the full (albeit accelerated) approval process that any other medicine would get. This behaviour would be crazy in a country like the US with thousands dying, but it made sense in a country where most citizens have negligible risk day-to-day.

by b0sk 5y ago

petertodd 5y ago

> COVID vaccines particularly give you far higher neutralization titers than a prior infection. Do you have a source for that?

icedchai 5y ago
Here's one: https://www.contagionlive.com/view/immune-response-from-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-is-more-robust-than-natural-infection https://www.contagionlive.com/view/immune-response-from-mrna...
- petertodd 5y ago
  The study itself says that the immune response to the vaccine is not as diverse as a natural infection. That's how the study tried to figure out who had been infected: "Natural exposure induces a dominant Ab response against the nucleocapsid protein (NP), but since NP is not in the vaccine, there is no vaccine induced response against it. In this way vaccinated people who had a prior natural exposure can be classified because they have Abs to NP." Simply looking at one aspect of immunity - detectable antibodies in the blood - is a very incomplete way of looking at the overall level of protection. For example, it's well known that mucosal immunity is important, and injected vaccines have a hard time inducing that kind of immunity: https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has-a-better-shot-at-ending-the-pandemic/589821/ https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has-... It's also concerning that there is evidence that while people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to be infected. If they do get infected, they are more likely to be infected with one of the variants than unvaccinated: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA728463 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA728463 The immune response developed to our vaccines is quite specific - they only generate the spike protein - which leads to a much less diverse response than a natural infection. Finally, the study you quoted can't really compare apples to apples anyway, as it's defining prior infection as simply having some level of antibody response, without considering how mild or severe those infections actually were.
  - amluto 5y ago
    > Simply looking at one aspect of immunity - detectable antibodies in the blood - is a very incomplete way of looking at the overall level of protection. For example, it's well known that mucosal immunity is important, and injected vaccines have a hard time inducing that kind of immunity: https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has- https://theprint.in/opinion/why-a-mucosal-covid-vaccine-has-... I have not seen an actual credible claim that injectable vaccines can’t produce mucosal immunity. IIRC the HPV vaccines seem to generate strongly protective mucosal immunity. The opinion piece you linked seems off, too: the mRNA vaccines and (possibly to a lesser extent) the viral vector vaccines do seem to prevent most infections. But it’s definitely true that antibodies in the blood are an incomplete picture. There are also memory B cell and all kinds of T cells.
  - nerbert 5y ago
    The spike protein is what is in common between all the variants. Getting a more diverse response doesn’t mean better protection.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    High NAbs titers in the blood against spike will almost certainly be protective and even in the absence of sterilizing mucosal immunity will confine any infection to the upper respiratory tract. I'm nowhere near as concerned about a variant infecting my upper respiratory tract as I am with being unvaccinated and having any of the variants attack my heart, kidneys, lungs and blood. The use of spike was also not a mistake. Attempts to produce vaccines against NP for SARS-CoV-1 produced signs of ADE, so that is why everyone is using spike-only (other than the few inactivated virus vaccines).
  - timr 5y ago
    > It's also concerning that there is evidence that while people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to be infected. If they do get infected, they are more likely to be infected with one of the variants than unvaccinated That's not "concerning"...it's a truism. You've made those people immune to the wild-type strain. If they're going to get infected, it's going to be to a variant. You're still missing the denominator (i.e. how often does it happen?) and the most important question: how serious is it when they do get infected? So far, the answers are "not often", and "not serious", respectively.

bpodgursky 5y ago

> glaring counterexample to your hypothesis is Brazil (Manuas) where prior infections (as high as 60%) didn't stop the P1 variant from ripping through This says nothing about the strength of a previous infection. It very plausibly just says that R > 1.7, ie it is infecting the remaining 40%.

b0sk 5y ago
are you sure about the infecting the remaining 40%. In every article I read, they specifically mention re-infections in many cases.

timr 5y ago

> [1] A glaring counterexample to your hypothesis is Brazil (Manuas) where prior infections (as high as 60%) didn't stop the P1 variant from ripping through. The prior infection estimates for Manaus were simply wrong. They were based on a paper that "adjusted" the observed seroprevalence rates upward by a factor of ~3x. The parsimonious conclusion is that these corrections were too aggressive and ended up over-estimating infections. See Figure 2a in the paper, here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33293339/#&gid=article-figures&pid=fig-2-uid-1 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33293339/#&gid=article-figur... It is a "glaring" example only of how the low editorial standards of major journals during this pandemic has led to a wave of confusion amongst the public.

petertodd 5y ago
Conversely, we can make the same argument in the opposite direction with the example of Seychelles, which in spite of the highest vaccination level in the world, is still seeing significant growth in cases: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56992121 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56992121 Apparently they're using 40% Astra Zeneca, 60% Sinopharm; hopefully the issue is simply the latter being ineffective. But as all the success stories with vaccination have also had very significant numbers of deaths with covid, we may need significant levels of natural immunity in conjunction with vaccine immunity to actually get cases to decline.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  The Seychelles are using Chinese junk.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  I don't see how anywhere could get to count as a "success story with vaccination" under your criteria while also not having "significant numbers of deaths with covid" and so I don't think you end up with a meaningful observation. New Zealand had zero community cases without vaccination, during 2021 its vaccination programme has only covered some front line workers and very high risk people, and it still has zero community cases. Is that "success"? Is it "not success" ? How would you tell? Whereas in my own country about two thirds of adults have had at least one jab, but still people are dying every single day from COVID-19, just much fewer than an the height of the pandemic here. Is that a success? Not a success? One of the reasons New Zealand was so slow? With zero cases they had no reason to do Emergency Authorization. So they didn't. The Pfizer vaccine they picked got the full (albeit accelerated) approval process that any other medicine would get. This behaviour would be crazy in a country like the US with thousands dying, but it made sense in a country where most citizens have negligible risk day-to-day.