4 ms·

Of course it was asked before COVID-19: there's no point in taking a vaccine for a disease you already had because the vaccine is not more virus-like than the v

Of course it was asked before COVID-19: there's no point in taking a vaccine for a disease you already had because the vaccine is not more virus-like than the virus itself. By definition there is no event closer to infection than infection; for the body, a vaccine is always a trial run. Hence things like chickenpox parties. There wasn't raging debate about this because it's obvious and uncontested. It's quite sad to see people now claiming it's some kind of novel scientific question about natural immunity vs not. This is basic, high school level biology. It's not advanced stuff and the people claiming otherwise are invariably using bad science to do so. For example, claims that infection doesn't stop reinfection are often based on studies with so few cases of reinfection that it'd fall below the noise floor for almost any testing system. The belief that these events are real relies on yet more bad science (the belief that mass testing has an FP rate of zero). The reality is that natural immunity is suddenly being questioned because "vaccine zealots" are desperate to suppress any messaging that might discourage people from taking it. They've lost all perspective, which means they're making claims that are contradicting biology considered so basic and important that it's literally taught to children in school. Then they sit around looking confused, wondering why suddenly so many "anti-vaxxers" and "skeptics" came out of the woodwork.

Pyramus 5y ago
> By definition there is no event closer to infection than infection [...] Hence things like chickenpox parties. Glad you mention chickenpox. Could you help me understand why the protein vaccine is much more effective than the attenuated virus vaccine? Following your argument there should be nothing better than the virus vaccine, because it is closest to infection?
- native_samples 5y ago
  It's not more effective, is it? The mRNA vaccines have proven to have zero efficacy after only a few months, at least for the goal they were judged against in the trials. They don't reduce the rate of infection at all. Even Boris Johnson has admitted that now.
myko 5y ago
Actually it is good to be vaccinated even if you have already had a disease. This confers greater immunity than the infection or just the vaccine. Whether or not the vaccine or natural immunity is better protection isn't as clear as suggested either, generally the vaccines will give more reliable resistance. Please read: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-immunity-versus-vaccination https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...: "Natural immunity can be spotty. Some people can react vigorously and get a great antibody response. Other people don't get such a great response," says infectious diseases expert Mark Rupp, MD. "Clearly, vaccine-induced immunity is more standardized and can be longer-lasting."
- mlyle 5y ago
  > Whether or not the vaccine or natural immunity is better protection isn't as clear as suggested either, generally the vaccines will give more reliable resistance. Yah, perhaps it'd be best to talk about mean and variance. For COVID-19, it looks like natural infection provides a somewhat better neutralizing titer of antibodies than vaccination on average. But there's a much larger variation in the response than vaccination provides. The people with the lowest responses are in the natural infection group, too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- native_samples 5y ago
  No it isn't. That's extremely bad advice, please don't tell people to get vaccinated if they don't need to. The vaccines can have nasty side effects and if you've had the disease you are hardly at any risk of being reinfected, let alone actually suffering disease. The data on this is quite clear, there are many studies that look at the testing data to find this. Example: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v... "Out of 149,735 individuals with a documented positive PCR test between March 2020 and January 2021, 154 had two positive PCR tests at least 100 days apart, reflecting a reinfection proportion of 1 per 1000" So that's really incredibly low. Note that this paper, like so many others, assumes a false positive rate of zero: with such a low number of reinfections they could easily just be testing errors and thus the reinfection rate can easily be even lower still. Remember - COVID is a mild disease for the vast majority. Having been infected reduces your chance of infection so low that it takes you from a very low chance of having serious problems to "you need scientific notation to express the probability of having problems". Vaccines can only make things worse for those people, not better. Unfortunately our society has completely lost all rationality over vaccines. Your so-called infectious disease expert is a great example of that. Firstly, he's dead wrong that vaccine-induced immunity is longer lasting. It lasts months at most, which is why even vaccine-pushers have given up claiming it stops you getting COVID. And antibody titers are not the end goal here! The goal is to avoid getting sick. They've completely substituted the means for the end, which is the sort of contempt-worthy irrationality that makes people reject the vaccination programme.

Pyramus 5y ago

> By definition there is no event closer to infection than infection [...] Hence things like chickenpox parties. Glad you mention chickenpox. Could you help me understand why the protein vaccine is much more effective than the attenuated virus vaccine? Following your argument there should be nothing better than the virus vaccine, because it is closest to infection?

native_samples 5y ago
It's not more effective, is it? The mRNA vaccines have proven to have zero efficacy after only a few months, at least for the goal they were judged against in the trials. They don't reduce the rate of infection at all. Even Boris Johnson has admitted that now.

myko 5y ago

Actually it is good to be vaccinated even if you have already had a disease. This confers greater immunity than the infection or just the vaccine. Whether or not the vaccine or natural immunity is better protection isn't as clear as suggested either, generally the vaccines will give more reliable resistance. Please read: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-immunity-versus-vaccination https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...: "Natural immunity can be spotty. Some people can react vigorously and get a great antibody response. Other people don't get such a great response," says infectious diseases expert Mark Rupp, MD. "Clearly, vaccine-induced immunity is more standardized and can be longer-lasting."

mlyle 5y ago
> Whether or not the vaccine or natural immunity is better protection isn't as clear as suggested either, generally the vaccines will give more reliable resistance. Yah, perhaps it'd be best to talk about mean and variance. For COVID-19, it looks like natural infection provides a somewhat better neutralizing titer of antibodies than vaccination on average. But there's a much larger variation in the response than vaccination provides. The people with the lowest responses are in the natural infection group, too.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
native_samples 5y ago
No it isn't. That's extremely bad advice, please don't tell people to get vaccinated if they don't need to. The vaccines can have nasty side effects and if you've had the disease you are hardly at any risk of being reinfected, let alone actually suffering disease. The data on this is quite clear, there are many studies that look at the testing data to find this. Example: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v... "Out of 149,735 individuals with a documented positive PCR test between March 2020 and January 2021, 154 had two positive PCR tests at least 100 days apart, reflecting a reinfection proportion of 1 per 1000" So that's really incredibly low. Note that this paper, like so many others, assumes a false positive rate of zero: with such a low number of reinfections they could easily just be testing errors and thus the reinfection rate can easily be even lower still. Remember - COVID is a mild disease for the vast majority. Having been infected reduces your chance of infection so low that it takes you from a very low chance of having serious problems to "you need scientific notation to express the probability of having problems". Vaccines can only make things worse for those people, not better. Unfortunately our society has completely lost all rationality over vaccines. Your so-called infectious disease expert is a great example of that. Firstly, he's dead wrong that vaccine-induced immunity is longer lasting. It lasts months at most, which is why even vaccine-pushers have given up claiming it stops you getting COVID. And antibody titers are not the end goal here! The goal is to avoid getting sick. They've completely substituted the means for the end, which is the sort of contempt-worthy irrationality that makes people reject the vaccination programme.