Not specific to COVID-19 so not in that forum. And this in not an anti-vax thread either.
Which is more effective towards preventing a disease, having the disease and recovering (so preventing a second infection) or getting a vaccination?
The reason I ask is because I was thinking - why are people that had the Covid getting vaccinations? One you get chicken pox you don’t go and get the vaccine. Assuming you survive your bout with measles, mumps and rubella you don’t take the MMR shot. And many vaccinations require boosters. Maybe it is different for rapidly mutating viruses. People can get the flu multiple times a season right? But does taking the vaccine stop that?
Of course, if you have had chicken pox the same virus can reactivate later in life and give you shingles, a truly miserable experience. Apparently you can get shingles twice, but a third time is rare.
The vaccines generate antibodies that specifically target one part of the virus (the spike). I wonder if antibodies generated from an actual infection may target some other aspect of the virus and are then less effective in general or less effective to variants?
There’s also the factor that we don’t always know for sure who has had COVID. A friend of mine, for instance, had some sort of nasty respiratory infection last spring. His doctor never tested him, because whatever it was, the treatment was the same: Quarantine, bed rest, etc. It was probably COVID, because most of the nasty respiratory infections in the past year were COVID… but it might have been a bad flu or some other disease. So he got the vaccine, and now he’s sure.
There’s the extreme case of variolation and smallpox.
In an early example of a mandatory inoculation, George Washington ordered the variolation of the entire Continental Army. The mortality rate at the time for smallpox was ~10% (greater if so many people were infected there weren’t enough healthy to care for the rest) with many of the survivors suffering permanent disability from the disease. By contrast, it was something like 3% for those inoculated with fewer permanent issues among survivors.
I suppose, technically speaking, the permanent protection from contracting the disease naturally is permanently effective so perhaps they are equally “effective” from the perspective of a survivor but what a way to get that protection!
Granted, most diseases aren’t as deadly as smallpox but considering that with COVID, the flu, and even chicken pox, illness is generally milder and shorter in duration for those vaccinated and they are generally less likely to spread it to other people, perhaps individual protection against future re-infection is not the best statistic to measure overall effectiveness.
Short answer: it depends. Notice that there has been considerable speculation that you might need a booster every year, like with flu. Either because it mutates or because the antibodies just don’t stick around that long. The point is that nobody knows at this point.
My doctor recommended that I get the shingles vaccination. If I understood him correctly it’s the only vaccine that is recommended for all adults that doesn’t prevent death.
I it possible that a vaccine that targets one part of a virus can buy enough time for other parts of the immune system to learn and develop other ways of attacking the virus?