They still haven’t given you a booster? That’s horrible! Good luck with that.
I got boosted nearly as soon as i could. (I had to wait a week to coordinate with the clinical study i joined when i did it ) I’m a big fan of vaccination. But I’m also old enough that my risk from covid is high. I understand why a twenty year old who felt like shit after her second dose, and who just recovered from omicron, doesn’t want another jab.
Anyway, to answer the op: i don’t think catching covid should “fulfill the vaccine requirement”, i think it should count like one dose of J&J vaccine, for whatever requirements there are – requirements that i expect to change over time.
There is no public health benefit to exempting anyone who is able to be vaccinated from getting vaccinated. Further, it’s obvious that this type of exemption would encourage people to get COVID, which is much worse than getting vaccinated – we already know of a Czech singer who got COVID on purpose to avoid vaccination and died.
In order to do this thing, which would be worse for public health and encourage bad behavior, we’d have to set up another tracking system to track people who have had it but are not vaccinated. This would be money poorly spent.
And, as the vaccine mutates and booster shots become more and more necessary, would we then require multiple cases of COVID for further exemptions?
If I were king and emperor, I would say no to this proposal.
My state’s vaccine record already tracks whether you’ve had several other diseases, along with other related information. So no, i don’t believe we’d have to “set up a new tracking system”, we’d just have to add additional data to the existing tracking system.
Yes. Just like we track which years you had flu shots, we’d have to track when you had covid and when you were vaccinated for it.
So, someone who doesn’t want to get vaccinated and had a case last year would lose their status to fly or whatever until they get another more recent case?
If you need your immunity to have been refreshed within the last 6 months, or a year, or whatever, yes.
If you are allowing people who were “fully vaccinated” two years ago, with no boosters, to fly, then no.
I strongly disagree with the OP, and some good reasons have already been stated. Despite the OP’s disclaimers about not being anti-vax, this sounds like a veiled attempt to discourage vaccination. Why? Why is it so important to avoid a simple vaccination that we have to make this exception and jump through hoops to properly authenticate it, when so many jurisdictions have both clear vaccination requirements for many circumstances AND have standardized on some form of “vaccine passport”?
Furthermore, such a policy would encourage vaccination-averse yahoos to intentionally get the disease, or if they already had it, to forego the additional protection that vaccination would provide. This would promote further mutation of the virus and basically be a threat to everyone.
I am extremely pro-vax. I’ve had a lot of vaccines I didn’t “need”, and there are others I would get if I were allowed to. (I recently tested negative for every having been exposed to HPV. I’d like to be vaccinated. But “most people my age have already been exposed” so public health rules don’t allow me to get it.)
But I also believe in following the science, and not pretending that disease-induced immunity doesn’t exist.
I don’t believe that marking down verified cases of covid along with verified doses of vaccine in your immunization record is a large strain on the existing system.
And the current theory is that omicron evolved in mice:
The prior theory was that it evolved in a single immune-compromised person who had it for more than a year (and would have caught it before vaccines were available) before it “broke out” from that person to the population. Note that vaccines don’t work very well in immune-compromised people. They should get vaccinated, of course, because it MIGHT help and they are at very high risk, but it often won’t help them. (My mom just died of covid, despite three doses of Pfizer. She was immune compromised. When she tested positive, we all knew the odds were against her.)
We aren’t going to prevent mutations by enforcing vaccination requirements. We are not going to run out of immune-compromised people (I hope!), nor mice. We are probably going to need regular boosters, and there will be regular break-thru cases. We may as well keep track of the information that actually matters. And I believe that that includes having recently recovered from a documented case of covid.
And vaccine-averse yahoos are already intentionally getting covid. At some point, you have to accept that there’s a certain level of stupid that isn’t going away.
We are supposed to be fighting ignorance here, not hiding facts.
Maybe so, but a respected epidemiologist recently referred to the unvaccinated as “virus mutation factories” in view of the number of mutations they’ve produced and have the further potential to produce. That’s following the science, too. My argument is not at all that disease-induced immunity doesn’t exist or isn’t effective, it’s that the only way we’re going to wipe out COVID is to stop it in its tracks with near-universal vaccination, not by condoning a continuing cycle of infections.
We aren’t going to wipe out covid. There are dozens of non-human hosts. We have to learn to live with it.
I am hopeful that regular vaccines will make not-too-awful for most of us. I am fearful that immune compromised people will need to take extra precautions for the rest of their lives. I am hopeful that non-vaccine mitigation strategies, like people routinely wearing masks in public if they feel “under the weather”, or if they know they’ve been exposed to something nasty, will become routine.
Anyway, I’m going to drop out of this conversation for a while. My mom died of covid Wednesday night, and not only are my feelings regarding covid somewhat raw, I also have stuff I need to do, like send information about the memorial service to a bunch of people.
Exactly. There more infections, the more chance for mutation. If you get your “immunity” from infection, then you are adding to the chances that a new variant comes out. If you get your immunity from a vaccine, you are not.
And as far as other reservoirs, whether it be immunocompromised or pet mice, they are less likely to contract the virus if the people around them have gained immunity due to the vaccine, rather than through infection.
Another benefit is that you don’t need to quarantine after getting the vaccine. Are all these people that choose to get their immunity through infection going to test regularly, and quarantine when they are positive?
Also, it’s far more rare for someone to have a negative reaction to the vaccine than from COVID. If someone chooses to get immunity through infection rather than the vaccine, if they end up with a bad case, are they going to forgo medical treatment, or will they be taking up medical resources that otherwise would be available to the immunocompromised, breakthrough infections, or all the other medical needs of the populace unrelated to COVID?
Unfortunately, it is the exact same people who would want to follow the medical advice of the OP who also tend to refuse to wear masks or socially distance themselves, even when feeling “under the weather”.
(And especially if they feel fine, which is the case for many infectious but asymptomatic cases.)
One last word, since I’m still staring at the screen:
I can’t imagine it evolved in PET mice! How many contacts do they have? It took a lot of viral generations to mutate so far. It likely evolved in wild mice. It’s been found in wild deer. It’s been documented in dogs and cats and lions and leopards and hamsters and mink, so it presumably can be carried and spread by foxes and coyotes and probably raccoons and fishers and squirrels and rats and voles and rabbits. We’ve never eradicated a disease with lots of non-human reservoirs. We aren’t going to eradicate covid.
I was reading how Spain is starting to discuss post-pandemic management of COVID as an endemic disease, treating it like the flu…
https://news.yahoo.com/spain-leads-calls-covid-19-094550498.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
Here are some of the facts. I won’t bother linking to the sources because most of the people in this thread won’t read it anyway and those who are really interested in facts can do a simple web search of a sentence in this post to find a link to it.
TL;DR Natural immunity is a thing. Pretending it doesn’t exist is the real anti-science political agenda.
FACTS:
“How much cellular versus humoral immunity contributes to protection after natural infection is not fully understood. Studies point at NAb as a key element of immunoprotection, with cellular immunity likely to provide additional longer-term protection especially against severe disease and death. How long overall protection may last remains unclear, and this may differ depending on the disease severity. For other human coronaviruses (hCoV), hCoV-OC43, hCoV-229E, hCoV-NL63 and hCoV-HKU-1, which cause the common cold, antibodies last for at least a year after infection with significant inter-human variability,16 while antibodies to more closely related MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-1, which cause, respectively, middle east respiratory syndrome and severe acute respiratory syndrome, can be detected for years.”
“Protection by previous SARS-CoV-2 infection against reinfection with the beta variant was observed, even 1 year after the primary infection, but protection was slightly lower than that against the alpha variant and wild-type virus circulating in Qatar.3-5 These findings give some insights into the hypothesis that natural immunity may provide protection against known variants of concern.”
Pretending that anyone is pretending that it doesn’t exist is the agenda of the strawman.
You also get immunity to chickenpox or measles through infection, still not best practices, either for individual or public health.
This.
No one in this thread ever made the claim that natural immunity doesn’t exist.
I guess I lied. Here I am.
You aren’t supposed to get vaccinated for chickenpox or measles if you’ve had a documented case of the disease.
(Those aren’t diseases that require regular boosters. Covid likely will be. But just substitute “recently had a documented case…” and the guidelines would be the same.)