You realize the article didn’t say anything, one way or another, on the protection provided by recovering from a prior infection? What you said is really a non-sequitor.
I do too, however, by stating that medically documented cases of covid will be recognized, that does encourage some people to go out and get COVID rather than the vaccine.
Everyone, no. If they stated that a case of COVID means you don’t need to get your 4th shot, I’ll still stay away from potential exposure, and get my 4th shot when/if recommended. So will many people who take this pandemic seriously.
OTOH, anyone who is currently resisting getting the vaccine will see it as an opportunity to be considered immune, without having to get the 5G installation that makes your testicles swell up.
I also don’t trust someone who chooses to get infected to quarantine themselves, or even to social distance, while they are contagious.
And the vast majority of those will be more than happy to get another shot, even if, technically, having had a round of COVID, they don’t need to.
Another one of my concerns is, well the jab isn’t free, and isn’t really all that cheap, either. It’s one thing for me to decide that I had COVID, and that should count as a shot, but I’ll be quite annoyed if others make that decision, and tell me I can’t get another shot because I don’t need it because I had COVID.
Well, I will be too. I’m also annoyed that you can’t get two flu shots in a year, even though immunity from the flu shot wanes in about 3 months. (So I time my shot to try to hit the peak of flu season.) But if the data shows that the marginal value of another vaccine after you’ve had 3 + infection, or whatever, is very small, that wouldn’t be a terrible decision from a public health standard.
Aside: I keep hoping that we’ll get a better flu vaccine out of all this vaccine research. The current vaccines are pretty crappy, as vaccines go.
Then I’m mystified why you posted the link in the first place.
Attempts to minimize the value of vaccination against the Omicron variant could discourage remaining vaccine holdouts from getting immunized, instead trusting to the acquisition of “natural immunity” instead. The reality is that full vaccination status has been shown to be highly protective against severe consequences of Omicron.
“In a multistate analysis of 222,772 ED and UC encounters and 87,904 hospitalizations among adults with COVID-19–like illness during August 26, 2021–January 5, 2022, estimates of VE (vaccine effectiveness) against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 declined during the Omicron-predominant period compared with VE during the Delta-predominant period. During both periods, VE was significantly lower among patients who received their second mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose ≥180 days before the medical encounters compared with those vaccinated more recently. VE increased following a third dose and was highly effective during both the Delta- and Omicron-predominant periods at preventing COVID-19–associated ED and UC encounters (94% and 82%, respectively) and preventing COVID-19–associated hospitalizations (94% and 90%, respectively).”
While I also look forward to significant improvements, those “pretty crappy” influenza vaccines have prevented a great deal of misery and death.
"Flu vaccination prevents millions of illnesses and flu-related doctor’s visits each year. For example, during 2019-2020 flu vaccination prevented an estimated 7.5 million influenza illnesses, 3.7 million influenza-associated medical visits, 105,000 influenza-associated hospitalizations, and 6,300 influenza-associated deaths.
- During seasons when flu vaccine viruses are similar to circulating flu viruses, flu vaccine has been shown to reduce the risk of having to go to the doctor with flu by 40 percent to 60 percent."
yeah, sorry, both my post, and @DavidNRockies , to which I was replying, are kind of off-topic.
## If I have natural immunity do I still need a COVID vaccine?
Yes, the COVID-19 vaccines are recommended, even if you had COVID-19. At present, evidence from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supports getting a COVID-19 vaccine as the best protection against getting COVID-19, whether you have already had the virus or not.
eta: off topic
Not me. I’ve had 3 doses of Pfizer, but if I was to actually catch COVID now, and some rule said “too bad, so sad, you still have to get another shot and we won’t take that positive test into consideration even though according to science we should” I would be pissed. I do not want to take unnecessary shots.
fwiw, I’ve heard from a couple of sources that if you catch covid, and you have some requirement to get vaccinated after that, you should attempt to wait several weeks after you recover before getting the shot, because if you don’t your immune system will parse the vaccine and the illness as a single “immune event” and the marginal value of the vaccine is about zero. Whereas if you wait until it looks like a new event to your immune system, you will likely get some marginal benefit from another exposure.
(sources are mostly doctors giving advice to friends in this situation. So moderately legit, but I can’t post a cite.)
I doubt that will happen for a while. Right now, scientists are cautioning against a fourth vaccine within 6 Mos of the third (except for immunocompromised people). I suspect we’ll go to yearly vaccinations.
I’m guessing we will be offered a combined flu/covid booster next fall. But who knows.
I don’t think a past covid infection should “count” for vaccine requirements, as long as people are honest and up front about why. I’ve seen a fair amount of denial that immunity acquired from infection is any good at all. And a kind of suppression of information about its effects.
I’ve mentioned before that I got a breakthrough case of Covid just before I was due for a booster. My kids both had it just before the vaccine became available for them. I could not find any information or advice about how long we should wait to get our shots. I wanted to maximize immunity, and minimize side effects. I got some tentative advice from the nurse that was checking up on us for quarantine purposes, but that’s it. Everything I could find from official sources was that it’s safe to get vaccinated as soon as you are considered recovered. But I didn’t want to get vaccinated as soon as possible – I wanted to do the most good.
I think dishonesty or suppressing information about scientific knowledge is reprehensible. It’s damaging, even if done for “good reasons.” There’s way too much shaping of policy being done by bending the scientific messaging. From Fauci’s “masks won’t help lay people” and CDC “hand washing is better that hand sanitizer,” and now infection-induced immunity should be ignored.
I am 100% on board that infection recovery plus vaccination and boosters provide the very best immunity. No one who has been infected should forgo getting vaccinated, if possible. And all of the knowledge about infection-acquired immunity should also be available so people can make informed choices, even if some people will choose wrong. Because suppressing scientific knowledge – the truth – is more damaging in the long run.
Rather than take your word for it that you had a stuffy nose last week (during which time, did you self quarantine?), which means that you had the proper dose of COVID and are now immune.
That’s the part that is lacking in your need to be pissed. Science doesn’t say whether we should, a complicated and expensive titer test, the results of which we aren’t yet quite able to interpret usefully, is what would say whether or not we should.
I’ve had shots, and I’ve had blood drawn, and to be honest, having blood drawn has always been much more unpleasant. YMMV.
Rather than having to get blood drawn, wait several days or a week or so for results, and then maybe need to get the shot anyway, I’d rather just get the shot.
Where?
Agreed.
Once again, where?
Which was based on the extremely limited information that we had at the time, along with a shortage of adequate masks for healthcare workers.
Isn’t it?
Once again, where is this said?
And so is tilting at strawmen that claim that the truth is being suppressed, that’s where you get people going to alternative news sources and thinking that the vaccine will make coins stick to their heads.
I’ve seen that immunity based on having COVID is harder to quantify than immunity based on getting the shot. I’ve seen that accepting exposure based COVID immunity may create perverse incentives for people to get exposed to COVID rather than get the shot. I think that those are two excellent arguments, and I’ve not seen counterarguments that actually address those points, just strawmen that avoid addressing those points, and instead address figments of the speaker’s imagination, albeit sometimes based on out of context and/or outdated information.
I’ve not seen the claims that you have made here, anywhere but on right wing anti-vaxx sites, anyway.
The comment about Fauci is not correct. Also, hand washing IS better than hand sanitizer unless there’s new information out there.
I don’t think anyone has suggested “taking your word for it”. But if you have a positive covid test, and your doctor enters “covid, 2/23/2022” in your medical record, that’s as “real” a thing as your doctor entering “pfizer, 2/23/2022” into your record.
Science doesn’t speak to how titer tests relate to immunity, but there have been as many studies measuring the impact of infection-acquired immunity as there have measuring the impact of vaccine-acquired immunity. In many cases they are the same study. Neither provides perfect immunity for all the people in the cohort. Both provide a lot of documented immunity. A lot of studies have explicitly compared the relative immunity provided by each, and they’ve come up both ways. That is, some studies have found “full vaccination” better than “recovered” and some have found the other. Every study has found that three doses of vaccine or vaccination + recovery is better than just “full vaccination” or just “recovered”.
it’s not a blood draw, it’s a nasal swab while sick. And you might have done that for other reasons, like seeking treatment or deciding to isolate. So you are really comparing a shot to “nothing more”. And I’ve never taken a day off after getting blood tests. I took a day off after each of my covid shots, and needed it after two of them.
If the science says that another dose of vaccine will provide you a significant benefit, then sure, you should get the vaccine. But if it says the benefit is minimal (and at some point, an additional dose today provides minimal benefit) then I don’t think we should be requiring people to get those shots. Should we all get a 4th shot three months after the 3rd? A 5th? I doubt the marginal benefit is worth it. But maybe by next fall it WILL be worth it. And at that point, people who had covid this year will probably benefit from another dose of vaccine, too.
On the flip side, I can say that I was really frustrated that the FDA was looking like it wasn’t going to approve a booster shot when the evidence was clear that a dose of vaccine improved the immunity of people who had recovered – which was a really strong indication that it would also improve the (rather similar) immunity of those who had had two doses of Pfizer. “Oh, we think 2 doses is probably good enough”. Meanwhile, people who had recovered were being pressured to get two more doses of vaccine when it was unclear that the second dose would do them any good at all. It all seems so political and “simplified” at the expense of good healthcare.
Yeah, that was really bad. All of Asia figured out that masks helped. Again, it was weird politics that prevented us from acknowledging it. (and it was sort of hidden in the official guidelines, which supported wearing a mask if sick or caring for someone sick.) They should have just been honest and said “we have a critical shortage of proper masks. Even though they might do you some good, they are much more important for healthcare workers, who KNOW they are being exposed day in and day out. We need to funnel all of our supply of good masks to healthcare workers until we can expand the supply.”
That statement didn’t say anything untrue. It just said the truth in a way that was intentionally misleading. That is not the way to build trust and communicate effectively.
It’s not as simple as Fauci trying to prioritize masks for health care workers.
“While Fauci, along with several other US health leaders, initially advised people not to wear masks, Fauci later said that he was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough protective equipment for health care workers. This was also early in the pandemic before public health experts fully knew how contagious the disease was and how it spread.”
"Fauci explained that at that time, “we were not aware that 40 to 45% of people were asymptomatic, nor were we aware that a substantial proportion of people who get infected get infected from people who are without symptoms. That makes it overwhelmingly important for everyone to wear a mask.”
The guidance changed after we learned more about how the virus spread.
“Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and a public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this month.He, like the others, suggested that masks could put users at risk by causing them to touch their face more often.
(My bold.)
Fauci was not the worst – the surgeon general and head of HHS were worse. But Fauci said it too. I remember because I engaged in debates over it on these boards.
Quote is from here:
There was a hand sanitizer shortage. Instead of saying hand washing will protect you just as well from covid, but acknowledging that hand sanitizer is often available when hand washing isn’t, the CDC declared hand washing to be better. Which it is in certain respects, certainly. But so is hand sanitizer. I remember a discussion on this board about how you should remove your mask and what you should or shouldn’t touch when you get in the car after being inside a grocery store, before you could get home to wash your hands. I was the first person to mention just using hand sanitizer, which I keep in my pocket and in the car. If you overemphasize that hand washing is better, people will forgot hand sanitizer, which puts them at greater risk.
Quote is from here:
Those are reasons to suggest that people shouldn’t use high grade masks in order to leave them for healthcare workers. It’s no reason at all to tell people that they should not wear masks at all, including homemade ones, and that they are more likely to get Covid by wearing a mask, because non-healthcare workers don’t know how to do it right. They gave incorrect or misleading advice based on the policy benefits.
And it turned out that people pulled together and made masks, because we got that they best stuff should go to the people who needed it most.
The example of this is right in my post. There was, at the time I looked for it, zero information or advice on how long to wait after a covid infection to get vaccinated. All searches I tried, and all but one of the healthcare providers I asked, said “it’s safe to get vaccinated as soon as you no longer have symptoms, or your fever is gone and symptoms are going away.” There was no advice concerning waiting – to maximize the length of immunity and the effectiveness of the vaccine, and also to minimize side effects.
The advice was just, get vaccinated right away after having Covid. As if the infection would have no effect.
The official guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is to get your booster as soon as you’re done isolating (a recommended five full days) and your symptoms have improved, meaning you have been fever-free for 24 hours.
This was the official guidance before omicron as well. I’ve only very recently been seeing some experts saying that a recent infection is like a booster, and you might want to wait 30-60 days.