You have every right to believe what you want, I am not God, and this is indeed America.
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/philip_k_dick_136851
You don’t need to be an expert to debate and dispute these issues, but you do need to bring cites - scientific research - to support any claims that you make.
I respect you and know what you are about. I am a 57 year old guy that just relies on wisdom and common sense.
My question to you is this. Is it your opinion that vaccines provide better long term immunity then natural immunity? I don’t think that is the case.
@Workingdude, welcome to the straight dope message board. I am one of the moderators here in the quarantine zone.
This is a thread about facts. Whether a vaccine provides more or less immunity than recovering from an infection, under various specific circumstances, is a factual question. Whether steak is better rare or well done is a matter of opinion. Opinions and facts are different.
Sometimes the facts aren’t completely known, and people have opinions about those incompletely known facts. But some opinions will turn out to be right, and others will turn out to be wrong. That’s just how facts work.
The style, here on the straight dope message board, is to argue facts with data. Data, in this case, is mostly from scientific studies. Yes, you can express a hypothesis. But you can’t just ignore carefully done scientific studies and continue to state your hypothesis over and over.
@Riemann isn’t attacking you (which isn’t allowed outside the BBQ pit), he’s just attacking your hypothesis, which is allowed.
I hope your enjoy this message board. But as a moderator, I’m asking you to follow our rules and our style when you are here. And that means that if you want to refute @Riemann , you need to do so with citations, not with an appeal to your hurt feelings.
This clarifying question is completely fine:
But this type of argument, in a thread about facts, really isn’t:
What you appear to be doing is forming your own mental model of how you think immunity works (without any expertise in immunology), and then using that model to deduce what you think should happen rather than citing any evidence for whether that does happen.
This is not wisdom or common sense. Those things involve knowing your own limitations.
One of the major fallacies that you seem to embrace is the “appeal to nature”.
Things are not better just because they are natural. Cancer is natural.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that exposing your immune system to something that evolved in bats is going to be “better” than exposing it something carefully developed by humans with the explicit goal of safely and effectively triggering the best immune response. Look at what happened with Smallpox. The outcome from “natural” exposure of the immune system to the virus was that 30% of infected people died, and most of the rest were horribly scarred. But vaccination was so effective that the virus is extinct in the wild.
Nothing rests on my opinion, what matters is the evidence. This is a pretty good overview of what we know, although it’s a little out of date. Note that the executive summary here is also not just opinion. Everything here is backed up by with referenced research data.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/vaccine-induced-immunity.html
In terms of any personal health decisions that you make, I think these are the two key points:
Whereas there is a wide range in antibody titers in response to infection with SARS-CoV-2, completion of a primary vaccine series, especially with mRNA vaccines, typically leads to a more consistent and higher-titer initial antibody response.
Vaccine-induced immunity is better in the short term. But what is probably more significant than any difference in the average level of protection is that infection-induced immune response is much more variable. So as an individual, prior infection gives you much less certainty over your level of protection from reinfection.
Substantial immunologic evidence and a growing body of epidemiologic evidence indicate that vaccination after infection significantly enhances protection and further reduces risk of reinfection, which lays the foundation for CDC recommendations.
I cannot imagine why you are so concerned with this issue, other than to use prior infection as an excuse to refuse vaccination. And the evidence on this is strong and definitive. Vaccines are extremely safe, and provide significant additional protection even if you have already been infected.
I just asked a question. You didn’t answer. I feel a little disturbed. Lets keep things simple. No need for drama.
Moderating:
@Workingdude , please leave this thread and do not return at least until July third. I am giving you a time-out.
Your posts are overly personalizing a factual discussion.
What did I do wrong. The others are attacking me. It’s your karma. You want to beat me up for my opinions then kick me out.
Moderating:
You disobeyed a direct moderator instruction. That will be a formal warning. Do not post again in this thread until July 3 at the earliest.
You also questioned moderation within the thread, rather than taking it to About This Message Board. Because you are new, I’m just telling you that that’s what you need to do going forward.
And here’s a deep dive from David Gorski into all of this.
Great review article. The hybrid immunity is especially useful for me. I was recently infected (exposed last Thursday) after a second booster in May. Barely got sick, but I’m hoping it will extend my immunity during the Fall semester.
Looks like we’ll have a covalent omicron/original strain booster in the fall, possibly as early as September. So that should help, too.
an update from
Following the vote, and striving to use the best available scientific evidence, we have advised manufacturers seeking to update their COVID-19 vaccines that they should develop modified vaccines that add an omicron BA.4/5 spike protein component to the current vaccine composition to create a two component (bivalent) booster vaccine, so that the modified vaccines can potentially be used starting in early to mid-fall 2022.
Yeah, I saw this yesterday which sort of puts me in a quandary. If I wasn’t infected, I would have got the booster in September. Now I’m wondering if I should wait a month or two to have better protection during the holiday surge.
Looking at the uptick in covid deaths I have to wonder if herd immunity will ever take hold or if the current death rate is what herd immunity looks like.
Well, 6x as many unvaxxed people are dying than vaxxed, even though they are a minority of the population, so vaccination can still make a big difference in terms of death rates.
They are aiming for releasing the omicron booster in September, so you’re in good shape.
I’m not disputing that but I’m question where we are regarding herd immunity.
Maybe the rest of the population can get their vaccines to help us get there. I agree that, if that doesn’t happen, we’ll be losing thousands of lives needlessly.
With a coronavirus (any of them, not just SARS-CoV-2), there is no meaningful “herd immunity” to transmission because immunity after infection is so short-lived.
Now, what we can get to is a point where SARS-CoV-2 has fairly low infirmity, much like the legacy coronaviruses that currently cause annoying colds but rarely send anyone to the hospital. By and by, there will be a time when almost all people go through multiple SARS-CoV-2 infections as children, teens, and young adults – just as happens today with legacy coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, RSV, adenoviruses, etc. So the middle-aged and elderly of the 2060s-2080s (say) will have pretty solid immunological memory against SARS-CoV-2, and the percentage of that cohort that get hospitalized or pass away from their infections will be very small.
That’s not to say that we need to wait 40-60 years for death rates to drop. IMHO, they should drop at some point over the next few years. It’s just hard to know when that downturn will take place and stick. It seems like there are still today a lot of vulnerable folks (whether by choice or not) yet for COVID to run through.
I’ve been reading up on another coronavirus, HKU1, which emerged sometime in the mid-aughts, possibly in Hong Kong, but sources on the internet differ. Like the current omicron sub-variants, it’s mostly an upper respiratory infection, and can cause disease of varying severity in different people. I read about one case study involving an obese woman in her late 30s with no other comorbidities who died from it, but for most people it feels more like the common cold. I’ve been trying to get a sense of whether it’s less severe on average or just less contagious. My interest was spurred by getting it myself a few weeks ago. I know this is what I had because I’m still in the vaccine trial, so whenever I have symptoms, they test me for COVID as well as several other illnesses with similar symptoms, and that’s what I came up positive for.
Now that I’m recovering from a mild bout of COVID this week, I guess I feel like HKU1 was subjectively slightly worse for me, but then, I wasn’t vaccinated against that. I feel that the severity of my symptoms for both illnesses would be an insufficient basis for the kind of public health mandates I’ve supported during the COVID pandemic, so I’m hopeful about a return to normalcy. But just as normalcy involves a certain number of people dying of the flu every year, I think our new normal is going to mean a certain number of COVID deaths in perpetuity, with the majority being among the vulnerable and/or unvaccinated. I would hope that this experience would lead us to be more diligent about getting our shots every year and staying home when we’re sick, but sadly things seem to be trending the opposite direction.