"We studied 72 persons, all of whom had a previous positive RT-PCR test but were symptom-free for >3 weeks before blood was collected for testing (Table)."
Reading this page I'm not sure how they are handling the possibility of false positives. That is, some percentage of their 72 persons with a positive PCR test were actually false positives and never had the disease and thus don't have antibodies.
Just googling for "RT-PCR covid false positive" turns up this result[1] which says "They combined the results of multiple studies (some looked at PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 specifically, and some looked at PCR testing for other RNA viruses). They found false positive rates of 0-16.7%, with 50% of the studies at 0.8-4.0%."
If you assume 1% false positive rate, and 80 million tests[2], then that means 80,000 are false positives. 6,873,739 total positive tests, so false positives should make up ~12% of positive cases.
Given the range of possible values for the false positive rate it seems reasonable to me to suspect that this might be entirely or mostly explained by false positive rate. Unless I've missed something where they account for this.
edit: From their appendix:
"While we cannot formally exclude false positive RT-PCR results for some participants, PCR contamination is highly unlikely as an explanation for our findings for several reasons.
First, serologic non-responders were identified by three different diagnostic laboratories (Appendix Table 1), all of which employed stringent quality control measures to guard against false-positive results. Second, we were able to independently amplify SARS-CoV-2 sequences from a subset of the original nasal swab material. Analyzing 4 samples from seropositive and 8 samples from seronegative persons (Appendix Table 1), we amplified full-length spike genes
with intact open reading frames from four specimens, including two from seronegative persons (Appendix Figure 5). Finally, RT-PCR positive seronegative persons have also been identified by several other groups"
Not really sure how to integrate their explanation with my intuition described above. If samples were contaminated that might explain why repeat testing of the samples continued to show infection. I feel like this definitely merits a follow up investigation with a larger sample size than 71.
This, and it’s possible there are real positives where the disease never took. That is, it was detected in the nasal cavity or wherever they’re sampling, but never became an infection that the body had to care about.
Many covid symptoms are also common symptoms of other things (e.g. fatigue, headache, cough). People could legitimately report having covid symptoms while not having covid.
Nobody reads the actual papers it seems. As you point out, for those who don’t read appendices: 3 separate labs ran the pcr tests. And as the paper’s authors rightly point out, they can’t conclude for certain that there were no false positives.
from what I've read, each round of PCR has a chance of copy errors in a small fraction of the samples. after too many rounds, random noise is generated and amplified. false positives can occur from this noise if the number of rounds is too high, which is why they cap PCR cycles rather than letting it bake forever.
Primers (DNA pieces that „select“ the right DNA sequence to be amplified) can sometimes attach randomly on DNA and hence make PCR copy/amplify the wrong DNA. Especially, if the primer’s got bad (partially degraded for example).
If you don’t sequence the resulting end product you only detect that there was DNA amplified and might conclude the sample was positive even if it wasn’t.
Copying DNA does not work perfectly like copying files.
"Participants were a convenience sample recruited at the University of Alabama at Birmingham" [0]
_Convenience sample_ being the keyword here. As far as I understand they first had their sample and then tested the hypothesis. I would expect that they choose a sample that could invalidate/validate their hypothesis and not the other way around.
I think we really need to replicate this multiple time. I think that 72 people is a very small sample to draw a conclusion about a disease that we don't understand that much how it works (example: why young people with apparent no predisposition are in ICU ...) we should take this as a good step toward understanding more, but it needs a lot of replication.
Convenience sampling just means “we took a bunch of people that were readily available (in this case, probably college students)”. It’s not a sample built to be representative of the general population, just enough for a quick-and-dirty initial assessment.
Yes, I agree, that is also my understanding. But convenience sample is sometimes a bad choice for assessing a hypothesis.
So I think these studies are very important for pushing the understanding futher but also they should be treated as you say "initial assessment".
In general I think science communication needs to be fixed or improved.
We are now in a time where general public can access them. And this is very good and more should be done for this. But also the structure of how we present these studies should be adapted.
Just publishing open a paper following this legacy structure and wording is not enough. I think the structure of a published paper should be changed to include quality assessments like for example (and this is only an example):
After Abstract we should always have a Method Summary with the following information:
a. Original Article | Secondary Article | Replica of Z |
b. Replicated | Not replicated yet | Replicated by Y,Z,T ...
c. Small Group Sample | Large Group Sample |
d. Convenience Sample | (Simple, Stratified, Clustered) Random Sample | ...
e. Observational | Experimental | Self-Reporting
f. Limitations of this paper: ....
Or something like this. Few people read (or have the know-how) to read the papers and also understand how to use that into a decision making process taking into consideration limitations.
Edit: added clarify about what I meant with my critique of convenience sample.
It's a shame they didn't assay memory T cells in those same subjects. That would have given us a better understanding of their immunity, or lack thereof. There's more to immunity then antibodies.
They are around, but their existence and availability is assiduously kept out of the public discourse. I would bet even a large proportion of primary care physicians don't know about them. Any time the subject of natural immunity comes up you will still very often hear "but the antibodies wane after a few months" as though that is the sole determinant of how well protected a recovered individual is.
I will leave the reasons that our public health establishment might want measurement of natural immunity focused on a narrow and rapidly-decaying metric as an exercise for the reader.
In the first weeks of Corona's "official" entry to the US in 2020 (1), it was reported that sick people in the NY area had to pull strings or prove contact with a known patient or recent travel to an infected area to get tested when calling the official hotline.
So nobody who caught it on a train or in an office could confirm if they needed to quarantine, which actually happened.
If that person was later admitted to a hospital, it was game over for that hospital and any elderly people sent back to their nursing home.
1. The actual entry date was likely fall 2019 because of the Wuhan Military Games and airline travel from China to the US. SF never really had a hospitalization spike in 2020, so corona infection appears to have been spread out compared to other cities and was probably endemic in 2020.
Wasn't the first patient in France confirmed, post-factum, to have been in November or October 2019? What would be the chances that US people travel to China less than the French?
1/ The first confirmed case in France was late-december, probably infected mid-december. So the first case in France it a least in december. We can try to infere more but this is only speculation.
2/ Well, actually... So we French have a huge Chinese immigrant population, and a lot of Chinese students. Weirdly enough, of those i met and spoke with when i was a student or at my company (including my scrum master right now), none of them came from the coastal cities. I don't know why, maybe because the universities used to be basically free for them until 2018 (and are still pretty cheap, 5k/y i think?).
I wouldn't be that surprised if France was the first foreign country infected by SRAS-Cov2. Wouldn't bet on it, but wouldn't be surprised.
We know corona was in China in Sept. 2019 from the full hospitals in Wuhan depicted in satellite fotos, and outside China around that time from sewage sampling analysis in Europe. Beyond that there aren't a lot of specifics.
US health officials are reviewing death certificates, and sometimes re-classifying very early 2020 deaths as corona, but not always consistently. (The San Jose Mercury News recently had an exclusive article on this.)
But there hasn't been an explanation of how SF could get corona so early (2019) yet have so few reported deaths from it.
There is some evidence that the virus may have been widely circulating as early as May 2019. So we can't necessarily blame the Wuhan Military Games or airline travel in Fall 2019 until we have a clearer understanding of the exact origin.
Sure. The nice thing about Bulgaria is that I can go to any lab and request any test - I don't need a doctor to prescribe it. In a small city, I had 2 labs offering the test (QuantiFERON SARS-CoV-2), i.e. it's widely and readily available unlike here!
They meant primary care physicians might not know about the T-cell covid-19 test, not that they don't know about T-cells. PCPs cant know everything about everything, which is why there are specialists.
Nobody is arguing that you can acquire a good degree of immunity by contracting covid and doctors are certainly aware of such tests but there is little import in educating the public about such tests as there is little benefit to the consumer.
Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection than infection alone and supplies in the states are ample.
There simply is no conspiracy because neither the fact nor the motivation makes any sense. I encourage you to think through the matter more thoroughly.
We don't really know enough about the long term impacts of the vaccines. The heart issues being linked to the Pfizer vaccine are mildly concerning.
The evidence seems to be that the coronavirus will continue mutating and the vaccine will not stop people from catching COVID again at some point. The vaccine is also, in my experience, painful.
Given these trade-offs it is reasonable for someone who has already been infected to avoid the vaccine. People already eat bad food, don't exercise and take risks.
Prior infection does seem to provide better protection than vaccination against future symptomatic infections. But it's also possible that vaccination after infection could give a further boost to immunity.
We already know that the vaccines aren't very effective at stopping people from catching SARS-CoV-2 infections. However they remain very effective at preventing deaths. The vast majority of patients dying now are unvaccinated.
For an 18 year male athlete, is the risk lower than the risk from COVID? That’s the appropriate question. We don’t screen boys for prostate cancer. Why is that?
How do we know the vast majority of deaths are in the unvaccinated? Also, is it possible that vaccination status influences medical care? Can we do randomized blind studies to test your assertion? You are probably right, but given the lack of public reporting and the fact that people who make this claim never qualify it with the age or health status makes me deeply skeptical.
People have reported 1339 (778 confirmed) cases of myocarditis or pericarditis out of 363 million doses. This is not to say that the vaccine caused every case. Incidence in the general population is 10-22 per 100k. If I read that correctly as the annually.
Then one would expect 300-750 cases to occur within the same week in a vaccinated patient naturally. Another confounding factor is covid is known to cause the same thing so its entirely possible that we are vaccinating people with covid or whom have gotten over covid and in some cases blaming the vaccine for the effect of the disease.
Let us suppose that all reported cases are ultimately confirmed and one would expect 300 cases without the vaccination and thus the vaccine caused 1000 extra cases in 363M doses.
This is a 1 in 363,000 chance of a side effect that rarely kills you.
In that same 363,000 if infected with covid will see 726 deaths 0.002 death rate and most will have some sort of lung damage even if they were perceptively asymptomatic.
With a highly infectious disease and public health measures that aren't liable to last forever if you do not get vaccinated you will almost surely eventually be infected. The appropriate comparison is
chance of infection(near 100%) * chance of negative consequences * cost of consequences
vs
chance of vaccine related injury * cost of vaccine related injury + newly reduced chance of infection and negative effects if infected anyway.
An 18 year old male who will eventually get covid if not vaccinated is trading a 1 in 500 chance of death and a 60% chance of lung damage for a 1 in 363,000 chance of myocarditis with a drastically reduced chance of getting covid which will if contracted virtually certainly be mild.
It's legitimate to be worried about anything that may effect the health of your family but if you actually understand the numbers its crazy not to get vaccinated.
> An 18 year old male who will eventually get covid if not vaccinated
At risk of repeating myself, this thread is about people who have already had COVID. Getting vaccinated isn't going to radically change the odds of what happens in the future.
And thanks to mutations, it is quite likely that if they get the vaccine they're going to catch COVID eventually anyway.
The vaccines produce an immune response in the blood and are then are broken down and removed from the body. The only long term effect is immunity. It doesn't make much sense to talk about the long term effects of vaccination. Side effects such as they are will occur around time of vaccination.
> Given these trade-offs it is reasonable for someone who has already been infected to avoid the vaccine.
Given that people go to silly lengths to avoid small discomforts and things they are afraid of I'd bet you that many who would avoid the vaccine because they had already had it in fact hadn't and wouldn't be interested in a test to establish it because it would debunk something they are holding onto as it makes them feel safe. Simply vaccinating everyone makes the most sense.
> The evidence seems to be that the coronavirus will continue mutating and the vaccine will not stop people from catching COVID again at some point.
I don't think this is established at all but its a fast moving topic can you point me to such?
Recent study posted on hackernews from Israel says immunity from Covid itself is 13 times stronger than from Pfizer vaccines. There is absolutely no reason to vaccinate if you already had Covid, yet that’s not normalized. Policies are built around vaccination, and natural immunity is an afterthought.
Studies have also shown that people who have had the vaccine and covid have half the reinfection rate as those who have had covid alone. Granted this is reducing an already modest risk but there is virtually no risk to the pfizer vaccine so on balance it makes sense to vaccinate. Especially since reinfection means more spread including to millions of antivaxxers.
Conversely everyone who had a sniffle in 2020 or even 2019 thinks they already had covid. The message don't get vaccinated if you've been infected would ultimately if implemented lead to millions of people being exposed because they thought they had covid infecting millions of others who are unvaccinated.
So do we want to use our ample supply of vaccine to make everyone including formerly infected slightly more safe or do we want to infect millions of additional idiots. The choice is clear.
Even in the fictional world where everyone was smart enough to understand the nuanced message of get tested to ensure you actually had covid we would be expending scant medical resources to do what? Help people be slightly less safe to avoid feeling unwell for two days?
That’s very first world thinking, we don’t have ample supply of vaccines, many countries are still without them. It’s about providing those countries with vaccines vs making first world people slightly more protected.
Also, vaccines are not completely safe, even though in very small number of cases, they did cause side effects, as serious as hearth inflammation or blood clots.
The decision about how to allocate doses and the decision of an individual to get vaccinated are not connected. There is no box to check to send this dose to a poorer nation. Given the availability of the dose it is logical for you to both ask for more doses to be provided to those who need them overseas AND consume the doses allocated to your state which otherwise may simply go to waste to nobody's benefit.
> Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection
This has been very sparsely studied (recovered individuals were excluded from the clinical trials) and is not as straightforward as you make it sound. At least one study has already suggested that cellular immune response may be eroded by a second dose of the mRNA vaccines.
> A reminder: they have not been formally peer-reviewed and should not guide health-related behavior or be reported in the press as conclusive.
A scientific viewpoint does not consist of finding a months old non peer reviewed study that suggests a viewpoint might be correct. In actual fact vaccinated individuals have half the reinfection rate across a large population.
Understanding (confirmation?) of memory T cell immunity might also tamp down the popular concerns regarding waning / lowering of of circulating B antibody levels.
It seems we’re champing at the bit to get boosters going for non-immune compromised people before we even know what the correlate of protection against SARS-CoV-2 is.
This explains why COVID vaccination is capable of treating long COVID in some cases. Hopefully this will lead to some actual treatments for long COVID (for example, a more aggressive regimen of vaccinations), at least the kind of long COVID that results from mild illness.
Completely anecdotally but I had covid in late Feb 2020…no antibodies, brain fog and some chest pain and to my great surprise after the second vaccine two months ago I feel better than I’ve ever felt.
I did sleep for 36 hours over that weekend, could be something to do with it.
Obviously its important to understand the mechanism so we can potentially help more people. If it was placebo, it doesnt diminish the poster’s story, it just means there’s not therapeutic correlation
I have a friend who similarly recovered after her 2nd shot. She had COVID in November 2020 and was suffering long-COVID side-effects until June this year when she got fully vaccinated with Pfizer.
I met her 2-3 weeks after her 2nd shot and she was stunned on how the brain fog disappeared, she could focus and read books again, she managed to go to the grocery store after climbing down 4 stories in her house without taking a break to rest, etc.
Time is the best healer. I think this is a common fallacy that explains a lot of questionable health practices, chiropractic care for instance. I say that as a firm believer in chiropractic care. But science shows the back would heal itself even without someone cracking it. It’s no surprise many attribute the healing to the cracking. There’s a reason double blind studies are needed. The placebo effect is, like time, also a great healer.
Doesn't really track does it? Granted there is much more to an immune response than antibodies alone. To such a degree that an absence of antibodies wouldn't mean there wasn't some immunity present by the rest of the immune system.
I wonder whether good ol' snot plays a significant role in trapping the virus particles and preventing them from contacting the epithelial cell layers. Maybe that is why snotty children don't seem to get affected.
IIRC this was being discussed when testing first began, that for many their innate immune systems fight off the pathogen so quickly that it doesn't require the adaptive antibody production/retention.
That's interesting. Since May I've had symptoms that could be long covid. I did some rapid tests, and nothing ever came back positive. Since then I've been vaccinated with J&J. Did an antibody test two weeks after and nothing showed up. I'm wondering if there is any test I could do at this point to confirm if I've been infected in the past.
they are sort of hinting at something rather fascinating and I wonder how far I am extrapolating:
> Thus, nasopharyngeal viral loads represent a major correlate of the systemic antibody response, whereas age seems to have only a minor effect
In other words: you get bad COVID when you inhale it and it infects your airways. But when the primary infection starts elsewhere (eg: bodily fluids) the innate immune system seems to have the upper hand.
Imagine if all that frantic hand washing at the beginning of the pandemic was actually counter-productive because infection via fluids is almost like getting a vaccination: a very very mild infection that is rapidly eliminated. Further imagine if kids were partially protected because they mostly gain initial infection through bodily fluids very early on from their parents or other kids.
That's a lot of imagining and extrapolating but it's quite fascinating to think about.
I can’t help but see the bias in part of the CDC to undermine natural immunity in favor of vaccination as the only viable path. All their publications completely ignore the abundance of recent studies completely disproving their central thesis, always focusing on a narrow, and often problematic, set.
Edit: and to add insult to injury the the positive cases were from March-May 2020! My dyslexic mind read ‘21 as would be expected, but no!
79 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadReading this page I'm not sure how they are handling the possibility of false positives. That is, some percentage of their 72 persons with a positive PCR test were actually false positives and never had the disease and thus don't have antibodies.
Just googling for "RT-PCR covid false positive" turns up this result[1] which says "They combined the results of multiple studies (some looked at PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 specifically, and some looked at PCR testing for other RNA viruses). They found false positive rates of 0-16.7%, with 50% of the studies at 0.8-4.0%."
If you assume 1% false positive rate, and 80 million tests[2], then that means 80,000 are false positives. 6,873,739 total positive tests, so false positives should make up ~12% of positive cases.
Given the range of possible values for the false positive rate it seems reasonable to me to suspect that this might be entirely or mostly explained by false positive rate. Unless I've missed something where they account for this.
edit: From their appendix:
"While we cannot formally exclude false positive RT-PCR results for some participants, PCR contamination is highly unlikely as an explanation for our findings for several reasons.
First, serologic non-responders were identified by three different diagnostic laboratories (Appendix Table 1), all of which employed stringent quality control measures to guard against false-positive results. Second, we were able to independently amplify SARS-CoV-2 sequences from a subset of the original nasal swab material. Analyzing 4 samples from seropositive and 8 samples from seronegative persons (Appendix Table 1), we amplified full-length spike genes with intact open reading frames from four specimens, including two from seronegative persons (Appendix Figure 5). Finally, RT-PCR positive seronegative persons have also been identified by several other groups"
Not really sure how to integrate their explanation with my intuition described above. If samples were contaminated that might explain why repeat testing of the samples continued to show infection. I feel like this definitely merits a follow up investigation with a larger sample size than 71.
1 - https://theconversation.com/why-are-some-covid-test-results-...
2 - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/prev...
If you don’t sequence the resulting end product you only detect that there was DNA amplified and might conclude the sample was positive even if it wasn’t.
Copying DNA does not work perfectly like copying files.
"Participants were a convenience sample recruited at the University of Alabama at Birmingham" [0]
_Convenience sample_ being the keyword here. As far as I understand they first had their sample and then tested the hypothesis. I would expect that they choose a sample that could invalidate/validate their hypothesis and not the other way around.
I think we really need to replicate this multiple time. I think that 72 people is a very small sample to draw a conclusion about a disease that we don't understand that much how it works (example: why young people with apparent no predisposition are in ICU ...) we should take this as a good step toward understanding more, but it needs a lot of replication.
[0] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042-t1
So I think these studies are very important for pushing the understanding futher but also they should be treated as you say "initial assessment".
In general I think science communication needs to be fixed or improved.
We are now in a time where general public can access them. And this is very good and more should be done for this. But also the structure of how we present these studies should be adapted.
Just publishing open a paper following this legacy structure and wording is not enough. I think the structure of a published paper should be changed to include quality assessments like for example (and this is only an example):
After Abstract we should always have a Method Summary with the following information:
a. Original Article | Secondary Article | Replica of Z |
b. Replicated | Not replicated yet | Replicated by Y,Z,T ...
c. Small Group Sample | Large Group Sample |
d. Convenience Sample | (Simple, Stratified, Clustered) Random Sample | ...
e. Observational | Experimental | Self-Reporting
f. Limitations of this paper: ....
Or something like this. Few people read (or have the know-how) to read the papers and also understand how to use that into a decision making process taking into consideration limitations.
Edit: added clarify about what I meant with my critique of convenience sample.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
I will leave the reasons that our public health establishment might want measurement of natural immunity focused on a narrow and rapidly-decaying metric as an exercise for the reader.
So nobody who caught it on a train or in an office could confirm if they needed to quarantine, which actually happened.
If that person was later admitted to a hospital, it was game over for that hospital and any elderly people sent back to their nursing home.
1. The actual entry date was likely fall 2019 because of the Wuhan Military Games and airline travel from China to the US. SF never really had a hospitalization spike in 2020, so corona infection appears to have been spread out compared to other cities and was probably endemic in 2020.
2/ Well, actually... So we French have a huge Chinese immigrant population, and a lot of Chinese students. Weirdly enough, of those i met and spoke with when i was a student or at my company (including my scrum master right now), none of them came from the coastal cities. I don't know why, maybe because the universities used to be basically free for them until 2018 (and are still pretty cheap, 5k/y i think?).
I wouldn't be that surprised if France was the first foreign country infected by SRAS-Cov2. Wouldn't bet on it, but wouldn't be surprised.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
US health officials are reviewing death certificates, and sometimes re-classifying very early 2020 deaths as corona, but not always consistently. (The San Jose Mercury News recently had an exclusive article on this.)
But there hasn't been an explanation of how SF could get corona so early (2019) yet have so few reported deaths from it.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection than infection alone and supplies in the states are ample.
There simply is no conspiracy because neither the fact nor the motivation makes any sense. I encourage you to think through the matter more thoroughly.
The evidence seems to be that the coronavirus will continue mutating and the vaccine will not stop people from catching COVID again at some point. The vaccine is also, in my experience, painful.
Given these trade-offs it is reasonable for someone who has already been infected to avoid the vaccine. People already eat bad food, don't exercise and take risks.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
Prior infection does seem to provide better protection than vaccination against future symptomatic infections. But it's also possible that vaccination after infection could give a further boost to immunity.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/94258
We already know that the vaccines aren't very effective at stopping people from catching SARS-CoV-2 infections. However they remain very effective at preventing deaths. The vast majority of patients dying now are unvaccinated.
For an 18 year male athlete, is the risk lower than the risk from COVID? That’s the appropriate question. We don’t screen boys for prostate cancer. Why is that?
How do we know the vast majority of deaths are in the unvaccinated? Also, is it possible that vaccination status influences medical care? Can we do randomized blind studies to test your assertion? You are probably right, but given the lack of public reporting and the fact that people who make this claim never qualify it with the age or health status makes me deeply skeptical.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...
People have reported 1339 (778 confirmed) cases of myocarditis or pericarditis out of 363 million doses. This is not to say that the vaccine caused every case. Incidence in the general population is 10-22 per 100k. If I read that correctly as the annually.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32127272/
Then one would expect 300-750 cases to occur within the same week in a vaccinated patient naturally. Another confounding factor is covid is known to cause the same thing so its entirely possible that we are vaccinating people with covid or whom have gotten over covid and in some cases blaming the vaccine for the effect of the disease.
Let us suppose that all reported cases are ultimately confirmed and one would expect 300 cases without the vaccination and thus the vaccine caused 1000 extra cases in 363M doses.
This is a 1 in 363,000 chance of a side effect that rarely kills you.
In that same 363,000 if infected with covid will see 726 deaths 0.002 death rate and most will have some sort of lung damage even if they were perceptively asymptomatic.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200906202950.h...
It is legitimate to be worried.
> In that same 363,000 if infected with covid will see 726 deaths
We're talking about people who have already survived COVID.
chance of infection(near 100%) * chance of negative consequences * cost of consequences
vs
chance of vaccine related injury * cost of vaccine related injury + newly reduced chance of infection and negative effects if infected anyway.
An 18 year old male who will eventually get covid if not vaccinated is trading a 1 in 500 chance of death and a 60% chance of lung damage for a 1 in 363,000 chance of myocarditis with a drastically reduced chance of getting covid which will if contracted virtually certainly be mild.
It's legitimate to be worried about anything that may effect the health of your family but if you actually understand the numbers its crazy not to get vaccinated.
At risk of repeating myself, this thread is about people who have already had COVID. Getting vaccinated isn't going to radically change the odds of what happens in the future.
And thanks to mutations, it is quite likely that if they get the vaccine they're going to catch COVID eventually anyway.
> Given these trade-offs it is reasonable for someone who has already been infected to avoid the vaccine.
Given that people go to silly lengths to avoid small discomforts and things they are afraid of I'd bet you that many who would avoid the vaccine because they had already had it in fact hadn't and wouldn't be interested in a test to establish it because it would debunk something they are holding onto as it makes them feel safe. Simply vaccinating everyone makes the most sense.
> The evidence seems to be that the coronavirus will continue mutating and the vaccine will not stop people from catching COVID again at some point.
I don't think this is established at all but its a fast moving topic can you point me to such?
Conversely everyone who had a sniffle in 2020 or even 2019 thinks they already had covid. The message don't get vaccinated if you've been infected would ultimately if implemented lead to millions of people being exposed because they thought they had covid infecting millions of others who are unvaccinated.
So do we want to use our ample supply of vaccine to make everyone including formerly infected slightly more safe or do we want to infect millions of additional idiots. The choice is clear.
Even in the fictional world where everyone was smart enough to understand the nuanced message of get tested to ensure you actually had covid we would be expending scant medical resources to do what? Help people be slightly less safe to avoid feeling unwell for two days?
Also, vaccines are not completely safe, even though in very small number of cases, they did cause side effects, as serious as hearth inflammation or blood clots.
This has been very sparsely studied (recovered individuals were excluded from the clinical trials) and is not as straightforward as you make it sound. At least one study has already suggested that cellular immune response may be eroded by a second dose of the mRNA vaccines.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1
A scientific viewpoint does not consist of finding a months old non peer reviewed study that suggests a viewpoint might be correct. In actual fact vaccinated individuals have half the reinfection rate across a large population.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
My situation is ruining my life.
So.
I feel pretty good that they are making memory T cells.
edit: activated T cells. yes.
Memory T-cells are created and stored to speed up responses to subsequent infections.
It seems we’re champing at the bit to get boosters going for non-immune compromised people before we even know what the correlate of protection against SARS-CoV-2 is.
That doesn't make the experience invalid.
You simply can't credibly recommend it to someone else, which the OP doesn't do.
I met her 2-3 weeks after her 2nd shot and she was stunned on how the brain fog disappeared, she could focus and read books again, she managed to go to the grocery store after climbing down 4 stories in her house without taking a break to rest, etc.
https://youtu.be/lXfEK8G8CUI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system
0. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00367-7
The military finally shows up but they don't learn anything about the threat because you've burned all the evidence.
Earth is still defenceless.
The study have issues (well, one big: not replicated yet) but this is not one of them.
Figure 1, B: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042-f1
> Thus, nasopharyngeal viral loads represent a major correlate of the systemic antibody response, whereas age seems to have only a minor effect
In other words: you get bad COVID when you inhale it and it infects your airways. But when the primary infection starts elsewhere (eg: bodily fluids) the innate immune system seems to have the upper hand.
Imagine if all that frantic hand washing at the beginning of the pandemic was actually counter-productive because infection via fluids is almost like getting a vaccination: a very very mild infection that is rapidly eliminated. Further imagine if kids were partially protected because they mostly gain initial infection through bodily fluids very early on from their parents or other kids.
That's a lot of imagining and extrapolating but it's quite fascinating to think about.
Edit: and to add insult to injury the the positive cases were from March-May 2020! My dyslexic mind read ‘21 as would be expected, but no!