Republicans: Don’t want to get the vaccine? Get covid instead, and it’s all good!
"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Republicans fighting President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandates are wielding a new weapon against the White House rules: natural immunity.
They contend that people who have recovered from the virus have enough immunity and antibodies to not need COVID-19 vaccines, and the concept has been invoked by Republicans as a sort of stand-in for vaccines. "
Dying from COVID gives you natural immunity too.
And it protects other people. Win-win.
Every study done so far hammers home the point that “natural immunity” protects less and protects for a shorter time than vaccines:
This particular study DID include the Delta variant. And there are plenty of other such studies.
This new Republican idea is as stupid as stupid gets.
That’s just science, and everyone knows that scientists are socialists.
Also, death.
Worse - scientists are statist hive-mind Marxists. 
I’m amused that they keep touting “natural” immunity as though it was just a course of life. It sounds good, natural. Sign me up. Whatd’ya mean I have to get sick with covid to (theoretically) make that happen? You said it was natural, but I could have avoided it; I could have prevented it. So it’s natural in the same sense that getting run over by a fucking car is natural.
To be sure, getting run over by a car (if sufficiently successful) will protect you from subsequently getting hit by a freight train.
Unfortunately, that’s not a good analogy. Compared with Covid, a better analogy would be, getting hit by a freight train will protect you from subsequently getting hit by a marshmallow.
There is also the “long covid” hazard, in which some undesirable effects can persist for weeks/months after recovery from the fluishness. Natural immunity is kind of unhelpful if you continue to feel like shit. There is something like an 80~90% chance you will not get long covid, but is that a risk you want to roll against?
Doing the math on this is something the Republicans simply refuse to do. Back when I first saw this “Natural immunity” nonsense being touted, I pointed out that “Acquiring natural herd immunity” was just a different way of saying, “Let the pandemic run its course.” The only way to get herd immunity naturally is to let everyone get the virus.
Which means a hell of a lot of people will die in the process.
They just don’t want to do the math on that.
The only saving grace I can see now is that this attitude is so much more prevalent in the fringe GOP population that those deaths will be disproportionately Republicans dying. So, yeah, go ahead and screw up your election chances, guys.
I’d really prefer it to not go that way, but they’ve proven themselves immune to reasonable discussion, so I’ve basically given up, and now just accept this as the inevitable end game of this pandemic.
How well did that “natural immunity” thing work out for stuff like the black plague, or smallpox, or polio?
Unfortunately, they also act as breeding pools for the virus to try out new and exciting mutations that may lower the effectiveness of the protection given to those of us that did get the vaccine.
Yeah, but we’ll also be working on improved vaccines, and it’s a good bet that the Republicans will continue to refuse those vaccines as well.
This won’t be pleasant for anyone, but it will still, on average, be worse for Republicans.
So being a zombie would be “unnatural immunity”? (If there isn’t a COVID zombie movie out yet I will be amazed).
Pretty sure the COVID zombies would run away from brainz…
Yersinia Pestis is a bacterium. We do not develop immunity to bacteria. The Black Plague was brought under control by figuring out the nature of the plague vector and changing our habits to reduce the spread.
Smallpox and polio are types of viruses that can be effectively vaccinated against, whereas coronaviruses, in part because of their multitude of binding spikes, are much more difficult to suppress. Influenzas are coronaviruses, which is why there is a new flu vaccine every year. They are really hard to defeat.
Influenza viruses belong to the viral family Orthomyxoviridae, which are negative-sense ss RNA viruses. Coronaviruses belong to their own family, Coronaviridae, which are positive-sense ss RNA viruses.
Damn, I love this board. Go suck eggs, Reddit and Quora.
There are over 330-million people in the US. The current death rate is 1.4%. 4.6-million dead is a statistic unpalatable to them.