To be clear, at this point two years into the pandemic I have had to prove vaccination status for one thing only: to keep my job under the executive orders that required it (which I think have all been invalidated by the courts at this point). I don’t carry my vaccination card because I have never been asked to show it anywhere.
While I think a recent infection should “count” toward a vaccination requirement, here in New Hampshire it’s utterly irrelevant because there is no vaccination requirement for anything.
I would far rather have too many vaccination requirements than none at all. The situation where “vaccination requirements are everywhere but documented infections count” is preferable to “vaccination requirements are everywhere and infections don’t count” which is also preferable to the current situation of “there are no vaccination requirements”.
I have no idea what’s on right wing anti vaxx sites. And I fully agree that infection should not count, for policy reasons. But I have seen, here and in my experience with people I know, people who have the attitude I described. My agenda is, as I said before, for people to be honest about why recent infection is not accepted for showing immunity. It isn’t because infection-acquired immunity is inferior. It’s because there are good policy reasons to not accept it.
Sort-of-nitpick: But of course infection-acquired immunity IS inferior to the combination of vax- and infection-acquired immunity that being fully vaxxed provides to people who’ve had Covid.
ISTM that a problem with this issue is that too many people are unconsciously letting the discourse be shaped by the “freedumb” attitude of reflexive government mistrust that anti-vax propaganda has been industriously spraying all over everything.
The goal of vaccine requirements should be, not “What’s the LEAST amount of protection against Covid illness and transmission that I can be required to have in order to comply with this dumbass rule?”, but rather “What’s the GREATEST amount of protection against Covid illness and transmission that I can reasonably and safely be required to have?”
That’s why vax rules don’t require vaxxed people to go get infected with Covid for extra protection, because it’s not adequately safe either as a public-health measure or a personal medical decision. But they do, and should, require former Covid patients to get fully vaxxed (at least in places where vax shots are readily available), because that is both a safe and a reasonable expectation for maximizing protection against Covid.
An event i went to recently required either documented vaccination plus booster OR documented positive PCR test in the last 30 days. That seemed like a workable tradeoff to me since you can’t get boosted if you recently had covid, but it only gives you a 30 day reprieve and still highly incentivizes getting vaccinated.
People keep repeating this. This is NOT a problem. The vaccine registries are already set up to accept a doctor’s statement of “this person had this disease on this date” as one of the recognized forms of immunity for many other communicable diseases for which we have vaccines.
And I note that most other countries (other than the US) are already tracking this for covid in their vaccine registries.
The goal actually is “adequate protection”. That’s why it was controversial whether to let everyone get a booster shot, and that’s why they are debating whether to let anyone other than the immune compromised get a 4th shot.
We have already seen examples of doctors providing dubious and outright ridiculous exemptions from vaccine requirements, so what makes you think that some docs wouldn’t falsely certify that someone had Covid (a potentially lucrative sideline), or just make a wrong diagnosis?
As also mentioned earlier, I know of no accepted antibody level or other immune system assay result that establishes protective immunity.
What makes you think doctors won’t enter false information into the vaccine registries? I know that they can do it without actually administering a vaccine, because my doctor just did so. Apparently, for him to see my record conveniently, he needs to enter it into a system that talks to the state registry. So I now have 5 doses listed – the two official ones I got, plus his copy of the records of each of those, plus he added a record for my booster that was administered as part of a clinical study, and wasn’t reported to the state. (They did give me a formal-looking letter I can show people to prove I have a booster.)
I think the answer, in both cases, is that it would be malpractice and the state could pull their license for falsifying information. But they have the ability to do it already. (at least in my state.)
Well, yes and no. I am vaxxed and boosted, and I had covid in October 2021 (delta). My work required proof of vaccination, and it was unclear for a time if proof of getting a booster when eligible would be required. I would have become eligible during my covid isolation. If someone in my position were required to get a booster immediately after their Covid isolation, it would likely be a wasted vaccination, and deprive the person of an effective booster until 2nd boosters are approved. So, it could decrease rather than maximize protection. There are some reasons to still take a hard line, but it is not necessarily because we are maximizing immunity.
The studies I’ve seen showing that fully vaxxed and covid-recovered people have the best protection were done primarily with people who caught Covid early on, pre-vaccine, and we’re then vaccinated later, and some who were fully vaxxed and then had breakthrough infections. I don’t think they have included many, if any at all, who recovered from covid and then immediately got vaccinated. But there have been some indications from experts that a booster that close to recovery won’t add much.
(As it happens, I have not had to provide proof of a booster, and I’d have had a medical exemption for 90 days, anyway. But people who received different treatment from me would not have that exemption.)
It should be relatively easy to track vaccine doses ordered by a physician versus patients claimed to have been vaccinated, and to identify substantial discrepancies.
And what of the many asymptomatically infected who never got tested, but could later claim that a detectable Covid antibody level makes them eligible for a “natural immunity” exemption from vaccination? Would you be comfortable being in close contact with people like that?
As stated, there are multiple factors making documentation of “natural immunity” problematic.
You also don’t have to prove that your body had an appropriate response to the vaccine, or that you weren’t accidentally dosed with saline or a child dose. Some people who’ve been vaccinated may never develop good immunity. In both cases – vaccine-aquired and infection-acquired immunity – the immunity can be presumed based on our understanding of the affected population, rather than making anyone prove their level of antibodies individually.
A friend’s son was required to get boosted immediately after recovering from covid, as a requirement to attend his school. His doctor had advised that he wait at least 3 (i think) weeks after recovery so his immune system parsed the booster as a separate event from the infection, but that didn’t fit with his college’s timetable.
So now he can’t get a useful booster, because he already had a booster. No, this rule did not maximize his immunity.
Honestly, he’s 20 and I’m sure his immunity is adequate, so it’s not a huge deal. (He had two initial doses plus a breakthrough infection, plus the wasted booster.) But let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that the current rules are designed to maximize individual immunity.
No one in this thread, as far as I can tell. I’m also not advocating for an “exemption” from vaccination. Rather, I think the totality of your documented immunity-generating experiences should be tracked, and vaccine recommendations reconciled with those. So someone who was fully vaccinated last year and was treated for covid in December might not need a booster, yet.
Editd to add: actually, someone who hasn’t posted in a while was advocating for exemptions based on ann antibody titer. That’s not currently viable, imho, and may never be viable for this particular disease.
Which unverifiable anecdote? That my friend’s college age kid had to get boosted by his college, or that my doctor added records to my name in my state’s vaccine registry? I can’t prove the former, but if you promise not to disclose my name or state, i think i can send you a link via dm to see my official vaccination records. I suppose there may be some other explanation for my having five doses on file (two each on the first two dates) but most other explanations would also cast some doubt on how impenetrable those records are.
Also, there are generally more concerns with false negatives than false positives in antibody tests. This is typical of what I’ve seen:
The overall sensitivity of the rapid antigen test was 65.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] 56.8-73.1), the specificity was 99.9% (95% CI 99.5-100.0). In asymptomatic individuals, the sensitivity was 44.0% (95% CI 24.4-65.1).
Okay, @Jackmannii choose not to look at my official vaccination record, but it exists, my state allows me to share it, and my claim that there are five doses (on three dates) in my official record is, in fact, verifiable. My explanation as to how that came to pass, that my doctor entered extra records because entering them into his system (which talks to the state) so he could easily reference them, is not verifiable, i suppose. It’s nonetheless true. Neither i nor my doctor has any reason to lie about this.
The narrative that we can’t trust doctors, but we can trust vaccination records is false. I think many people want the world to be simpler and less imperfect than it actually is.