Not really, because your muscle where you got shot was mostly producing spike proteins. When you get the virus, it replicates in your lungs, immunity response happens there and if it’s too strong, it can destroy your lung tissue and cause death.
The vaccine produces spike
protein within your deltoid muscle cells, where it is rapidly degraded and presented to your immune system. It’s not running around in your bloodstream. Unlike the virus. Which means, incidentally, that if this is a concern of yours you should definitely prefer getting the vaccine to getting an infection.
No, exposure to the virus is like exposure to combat. You may not die, but the likelihood goes up the more time you spend exposed to it and the more of it you get exposed to. To keep with that metaphor a vaccine is like a war game, it won't kill you but it's not the real thing either. But if you've done it you're better off than if you hadn't.
Consider the magnitude of the immune response. In someone with pre-existing immunity the virus may replicate relatively little before being killed. Compare this to getting the vaccine, where your body will be flooded with spike protein whether you have previous immunity or not.
How come it’s not a muscle if the vaccination works?
Obviously getting more sick isn’t going to make your immune system stronger, but just getting sick is going to make it learn how to make antibodies for specific illnesses.
That only means you're in the place with a lot virus flowing around, nothing else. Vaccine stimulate your immune system to lower the chance to get infected, and even if infected much lower chance to get severely damaged.
Not unusual, look at tetanus. The tetanus toxin is so potent that the amount that can kill you isn't enough to generate an immune response, so even if you manage to survive there's no guarantee you won't get it again as you'll have no protection. The vaccine on the other hand generates a much stronger response than the real disease.
If you're counting on acquiring immunity naturally consider this:
1. You got sick and now you have antibodies but your internal organs, like lungs are scarred. You'd have likely avoided some if not all of that damage if you were vaccinated.
2. Your immune system might be targeting parts of the virus that are less universal across virus' mutations so it gives you less or little immunity against mutants. mRNA vaccine is specifically targeting the spike protein which so far has been unchanged enough for vaccines to be more or less effective against mutations.
Because for your body to fight a virus, it needs to have a good working immune system. Some people lack that for various reasons. A vaccine helps in this case but it's not 100%.
Being "fit" certainly helps your immune system. But as we see here, it doesn't make you invincible.
There's a good recent analysis of the hospital stats vs vaccination rates over time, amongst other things. But remember, our defense against viruses includes having infected cells kill themselves, so damage is always widespread over the body after a serious viral infection, it's just that the heart and lungs can't take time off or ramp activity down sharply to recover, so they're extra vulnerable. People dying days after recovering from Spanish flu and returning to strenuous farm work was common, for example. Two such cases among my grandmother's 12 siblings.
You're right re 100% infection by now. I had the first two shots (and two infections, one before vaccines were available.) But I did skip the next two, since the bivalent wasn't available yet and evidence re boosting with the same old vaccine was thin. (Antibodies are an indicator not the whole story.) Now I'm scheduled for a bivalent shot. The first vaccine doesn't really help with the new strain, says a recent study. (Google pubmed and you can really dive into the papers, and know more than I about it pretty quickly.)
I'm not a doctor or biologist, but afaik your body has multiple possible responses to a viral infection, and not all of them end with an immunity. The second thing that a virus may mutate more or less quickly, evading your previous immunity.
Can you explain the mechanism by which vaccines injected into muscle tissue impart mucosal immunity? The humeral immunity these vaccines impart doesn't stop the virus replicating in the nose and throat where it can spread to others via respiration. Mucose is not connected to the blood stream where the antibodies from the vaccine are.
Well, Injecting stuff into one's bloodstream and vaccination are two different things. Normally, vaccine is injected in a muscle, a tissue, not in a blood vessel.
And yes, flu virus (and other viruses) can (surprise!) replicate itself! And not the vaccine!
My mental model of this (and I'm not a medical expert) is that (a) for a given amount of spike protein, the immune response is similar, whether the protein originates from the vaccine or the actual virus, but (b) since the vaccine is lacking the actual health threatening properties of the virus, you can expose people to massive doses of it without incurring much risk.
Exposure to infections does not make you stronger.
Immunity is highly specific. This is why the flu is a chronic problem, it mutates rapidly enough that exposure to previous generations of the virus does not confer immunity to current generations. Immunity is more like a collection of solutions to puzzles than it is a muscle.
Being infected while in a healthier state and thus gaining immunity with less risk might be beneficial later, but you can look at mortality statistics and see that while infections are a major cause of death, they aren't responsible for a large portion of deaths:
Again, this seems counterintuitive to me. If infected, the immune system reacts to foreign bodies. If jabbed, the immune system reacts to foreign bodies. The intention of the shots are to stimulate the same system as a natural reaction, minus the threat of disease. If an individual wouldn’t have a strong response to infection, why would it be any different from a subset of proteins?
Is there academic research on this topic that existed prior to SARS-Cov-2?
Absolutely, after the first shot you do have immunity but it's not as fully developed compared with having two, so it will take longer to respond than with two, and that does present a larger window of opportunity for the virus to cause problems.
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