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.)
And if some people can be reinfected after one exposure, it's not necessarily a death knell for a potential vaccine -- you get multiple boosters for some viruses for a reason, and the vaccine just has to take in a large enough fraction of the population to protect everyone.
Excellent points. Much appreciated. My point is that just dealing with the flu, chicken pox, some transient herpesvirae infections, etc by letting the body's defences deal with it without actively vaccinating against them might be the best way to deal with problem. Often the body develops memory cells to defeat later similar infections on it's own. I am not convinced that the notion that we might over-vaccinate has been disproven.
No vaccine prevents an infection. None. Zero. Never happens.
The best a vaccine can do is train your immune system to identify and react to the infectious agent before it gains enough of a foothold to impact you. Often, especially if you've been vaccinated with the specific strain that infected you, it can do this before you notice you've been infected. Practically giving you an immunity, but not truly, you still got infected and your immune system still fought it off.
For viruses though it's a different story. Viruses mutate, the strain you got vaccinated against may not be the one that enters your body, but the vaccine means your immune system can mount an effective response. In these cases, it significantly reduces risk of hospitalizations and death from the vaccine, but does not mean you won't have some effects from the virus.
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.
Hard to imagine that infection and recovery from the actual virus confers less immunity than the vaccine, but even without knowing that, it seems reasonable that people who have already recovered should be a lower priority for vaccination than more at-risk groups.
To the best of our current understanding, the benefit of vaccination doesn't seem binary, so even if antibodies and thus immunity fades over time, it might still be beneficial to fight off a serious, life-threatening infection.
The current stats suggest that even though the latest variants are way more infectious and can defeat the vaccine, most deaths still occur within the unvaccinated cohort.
There's a critical point I think is getting lost in the shuffle: yes, vaccine immunity may not be as robust as natural immunity, but (1) it does seem to protect against severe cases, (2) precisely because the protection is imperfect, the first infection you get after being vaccinated should train the immune system in a similar way as an unvaccinated infection.
So to me, the real question is, what is your immunity like after you get vaccinated AND then infected? Because that's what is most likely to happen in the long run, as COVID becomes endemic. Everyone's going to get an infection, so does vaccine + infection give you better or worse immunity than no vaccine + infection?
Increase in infections does not equal death. It does bring the population closer to herd immunity. Infections and recovery bring sterilizing immunity, which is not provided by the shots.
It's been awhile since I read about that study but didn't it determine that previous infection provided better resistance to infection than vaccination without a booster, but that vaccination provided better resistance to serious illness and death?
Either way I find it weird that the study clearly shows vaccination + infection provides the best protection yet people are using this to argue that they don't need a vaccination at all.
Both are fairly rare, but the latest data I've seen shows both 1) weaker and faster decaying immune response in previously infected people vs immune response from vaccine, and 2) previously infected people getting infected at abt 2X the rate of fully vaccinated people. (Sorry, no ref links on hand at the moment)
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.
Well, but how's the immunity derived from first being vaccinated and then infected? Do you simple acquire the better immunity with 93% lower risk of death during the infection?
Returning to this one after doing more research, there seems to be a 90%+ protection after reinfection, from all strains so far, and similar protection against hospitalization. Vaccination effects on previously infected individuals is touted as giving better protection, but the data is shaky at best. We'll need years more data.
The best case with mass immunity is that R drops below 0 and the virus burns itself out.
The worst case is that immunity primes the body for a massive and lethal immune system overreaction if the virus returns and/or mutates. This seems to have happened in 1918, which is why the second wave was more deadly.
Generally viruses seem to become less lethal over time, so this is rare and unlikely - and we'd be very unlucky indeed if it happened now.
But it isn't entirely impossible. The smart thing to do would be to have some high-quality monitoring in place to catch it if it starts happening, with high quality contingency planning for an international response.
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.
Of course antibodies exist against the virus - otherwise the fatality rate would be 100%. You don't just survive an infection, your body creates antibodies, and they stay in your body for a very very long time. That's the whole point of vaccination.
Once this blows over I'll go get my blood tested for antibodies for the virus - will be interesting to know if I had it.
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.)
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