Now THIS I could get behind.
No kidding. She’s just plain wrong. She can mean either one of two things, and both are wrong.
Either she’s saying that vaccines cannot completely stop transmission anymore, which is wrong because the covid vacines were NEVER able to completely stop transmission. Pfizer and Moderna were 90% effective against “wild type”, not 100%.
Or she’s saying that vaccines cannot even make transmission of Omicron less likely, which is wrong based on real world data. For instance, California’s state dashboard says, “From January 3, 2022 to January 9, 2022, unvaccinated people were 4.1 times more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people.”
She’s wrong. I don’t know why she’s giving fodder to anti-vaxxers.
California cite: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/
Me too. An infection plus a dose. Or infection + dose + booster. Either is much more defend-able than infection is equivalent to being vaccinated.
Or two doses + infection ~ boosted.
I’d even get behind someone who was infected twice because they does tend to decrease the variability in immunity due to severity of infection.
As long as we insist of lab-based or doctor office tests because I don’t trust the anti-vaxxers.
Exactly. My default assumption is that an anti-vaxxer is lying. I’ve heard far too many “Oh, I had covid already because I had the sniffles, and covid is just like a cold.” Tested? No. Just their ill-informed opinion, based on “feelings”
It seems that the Czech Republic has taken the OP’s advice. You get a “COVID pass” if you’ve recovered from it. Vaccination rates are only around 50% either because of vaccine hesitancy or lack of supply. So inevitably …
See post #96
Sorry, I missed that! 
This is basically what I’ve been arguing for. Keep track of documented infections and count them with vaccines towards whatever level of immunity is being mandated.
Of course we shouldn’t count “i had a cold last month and i think it was covid”. And i think we should all be trying to get boosted, although many guidelines still accept two doses of vaccine.
I wouldn’t even trust a picture of a home test result.
Ooooh. I thought you were arguing for one infection = two doses of mRNA or whatever. But an infection + one dose would probably be okay.
Of course, eventually a booster will probably be required for places that mandate vaccines.
I’m arguing one documented infection should count as whatever the science says it’s equivalent to, realizing that the science will change over time, both as our understanding deepens and as the variants change.
I think I said above that my understanding is that an infection is ~ a J&J shot. And while many places still count that as “fully vaccinated”, the medical advice from the CDC was not “you may get a booster” but “you really ought to get a booster” for folks with J&J.
No COVID vaccine that had the side effects of a case of catching COVID would ever be approved by the FDA; therefore, it should not be considered as an acceptable alternative to a vaccine.
I don’t see that that logic holds. If it is a provable fact that an infection conveys equivalent protection to that of a single vaccine jab then there seems little point in not recognising that fact.
It should never be considered as a recommended course of action as an alternative to a jab but I see little harm in acknowleding the protective benefit that an unwitting infection may confer.
I agree with @Novelty_Bobble . Of COURSE no medical authority would recommend catching covid. The risks are far too high. Even for the young and healthy, the risks of catching covid are far higher than the risks of vaccination, and of course anyone who catches it can give it to others.
That doesn’t mean we can’t recognize that having recovered from covid means you likely developed some degree of immunity.
Also, two points:
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there have been contagious vaccines. The live polio vaccine could be spread to others, and while that was usually harmless, my understanding is that it rarely mutated into a more dangerous form of polio. I think it’s no longer given in countries that have eradicated polio for that reason.
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the covid vaccine doesn’t confer exactly the same degree of immunity to everyone who gets it, either. If you look at the studies, you typically see a wide spread of dots, along with a median and some standard deviation bars. My mom, who was severely immunocompromised, appears to have developed no immunity from the vaccine. Some people get very high degrees of immunity from vaccination. Nothing in medicine is uniform and completely predictable across a population. Is immunity from an infection more variable than from vaccination? Not that i know of. If studies show it is far more variable, that’s a reason to not accept it as evidence of immunity. But having actually recovered is pretty decent evidence of having mounted an immune response. So i would presume the “low end” of immunity from infection isn’t worse than from vaccination until i saw evidence to the contrary.
It’s impossible not to observe how this perspective is focused on me, me, me and not that the other purpose of the vaccine is to blunt the impact to society at large. You may not care if you get sick for a few days for something that you hope is mild. But you would be very unhappy if your child fell off a ladder, broke a leg (or worse), and couldn’t be seen at the ER because it was full of COVID patients.
And they know it was Omicron how, exactly? Did a doctor tell them, or do they have access to a lab or test kit that differentiates strains? Omicron isn’t dominant everywhere, there are still multiple strains circulating.
It’s just so interesting how anti-vaxxers seem to be in possession of otherwise unknown bits of information that inevitably add up to the fact that they don’t have to do things they don’t want to do. Funny how it always shakes out like that.
In my state, they are saying that 99.4% of all infections are currently omicron. And vaccination is much more effective against delta than omicron, so a vaccinated person who catches covid is more likely to get omicron even if it isn’t totally dominant in their geographic area. So I assumed omicron. No one has told me “I got omicron”. Why would I even care?
And I find it odd that you are accusing me of saying “me, me, me”. I have not caught covid. I have taken fairly extreme precautions to avoid both catching and spreading it, including getting every vax I’ve been eligible for as soon as I could, and wearing a high-quality mask on the rare occasions I’ve left the house in the past 2 years. I’ve also personally nudged a lot of people to get boosters, when the FDA was waffling on who “needed” it. Because “full vaccination” is not enough to significantly reduce the spread of omicron, but a booster really does reduce the risk you will catch it and spread it.
I don’t think anyone is accusing you of saying “me, me, me”. You’re certainly not like this at all.
But your arguments are giving a lot of cover to those who ARE saying “me, me, me”. Cover to those who are coming up with any excuse they can grab onto to avoid a getting a reasonable medical vaccine. Basically, they are “I don’t wanna, and here’s my excuse.”
You are reasonable, responsible, and make good choices. Don’t assume that those who are pulling out all the stops to avoid getting the vaccine are the same as you.
Yes, in particular bringing up the completely irrelevant “vaccine shedding” argument.
Antivaxers have long demonized the vaccinated as being “shedders”, a highly deceptive claim recently revived by those opposed to Covid-19 vaccination.
Giving ammo to antivaxers (even when it’s dud ammo) is a bad idea.
Huh? I challenged someone who brought that up. I didn’t bring it up.
Or wait, i asked what the heck someone meant by the vaccine being “leaky”. I don’t think anyone has brought up “vaccine shedding” recently, until you just did.