Am I reading the conclusion correctly that people who were infected with some strain of COVID and received two doses of the vaccine fared better against future variants than people who only received the vaccine?
I think that's somewhat expected, and basically analogous to "defense in depth". The mRNA vaccines only code for the characteristic spike protein, but an actual infection can result in developing antibodies against multiple features on the surface of the virus. Both being better than either alone is reasonable result of that.
The problem with natural immunity is that it can be so variable. Some people would develop better immunity from being infected than they would from just the vaccine, but some would develop much weaker immunity from the infection.
> The problem with natural immunity is that it can be so variable. Some people would develop better immunity from being infected than they would from just the vaccine, but some would develop much weaker immunity from the infection.
And some will develop autoimmune disorders. The mRNA vaccines being highly specific is an important safety feature.
It's been theorized for a while. For Multiple Sclerosis - an autoimmune nerve disease - a curious phenomenon is that 100% of patients have been infected with EBV, the cause of mono, while the base rate in the population is about 90%.
It is probably also worth noting that while this sort of defense in depth provides the strongest protection, the risk involved with the first infection probably means that you are better off in trusting the vaccine. Infection prior to vaccination may provide a stronger immune response, but only if you survive the infection.
Oh, absolutely. I think I unintentionally implied that just getting infected was a good strategy, but I 100% agree. The vaccine is awesome, and a far superior option.
It's also hard to actually compare those things because there's an enormous literal survivor bias here. The living population of previously infected people have already demonstrated the ability to survive COVID.
If you took those same people, and magically made them immunologically naive, they would fare better than a random sample.
As others have pointed out, it also includes adding the vaccine, so that's better than simply natural exposure, and it's a catch-22 - in order to best prevent yourself from catching a life threatening virus you first need to catch the virus?
ok, if thats not true, and we know that its very rare to suffer from covid twice, why is the rate of death in the UK much lower post vaccination (and without lockdown) vs before (and with)?
How rare is it actually though? Just a bit of anecdotal evidence, but my office has had several outbreaks in the last several months. Many in the office have caught it multiple times in the that timeframe, a couple of which I know are fully vaccinated.
> Many in the office have caught it multiple times in the that timeframe.
If thats the case, and those are confirmed with PCR test, then we are catastrafucked. In the UK double infections are pretty rare. Given the routine level of testing (~1million tests a day) I'd expect to see some sort of indication or worry from the statisticians.
> a couple of which I know are fully vaccinated.
Again, I'd expect this to see some level of data to support double infections in vaccinated people with "normal" immune systems. I'd expect to see that data in the UK or Israel, possibly south korea as well.
I'm sure it happens, but at a scale that we would see in a normal office, suggests something really quite common. But I can't find evidence to support that (I have a lot of doctor friends, who'd i'd expect to get re-infected, especially as they have been more lax with the little PPE they have. )
So to give a bit more insight. We've been back in the office since May of 2020. The vast majority of the office works in close contact, and no mitigation efforts are taken to prevent infection. The vast majority of the office is also unvaccinated. What we do have is a response protocol. If you wake up and feel unwell at all, you're asked to go take a COVID test. Most will simply go take a rapid test on their way into work, and they'll wait in the parking lot until they get their results.
The last 2 outbreaks have been among the exact same group of people: the office bible study group. That group meets at least once a week in close quarters for an hour or two at a time.
As of right now, at least 5 of the people that are currently out and have positive PCR tests have had it at least one other time in the last three to four months, with another positive PCR test to confirm. Our company requires everyone send in their proof of a negative or positive tests each time they're taken, and you cannot return to work until it's been submitted.
Original: Sorry, are you arguing that the vaccine has killed more people than the virus? Because there's no way you have numbers that actually support that. Given that there are now far more vaccinated than infected in America, you'd need to find near on a million vaccine deaths.
What? No. The vaccine makes the death complications less likely. You might still get Covid after being vaccinated, but you probably won’t get the full vascular infection if you were vaccinated beforehand. That’s all I mean.
How is it not? Compare the number of people who got immunity through COVID infection / those who died of COVID vs. number of people who got immunity through vaccination / those who died of the vaccination.
I'm not talking about the vaccine itself killing people, and I don't believe the comment I replied to was either. I'm saying that more people have died from Covid after being vaccinated than have died from Covid after having gained natural immunity. Meaning they survived the first infection, got infected again, and then died from that second infection.
>I'm saying that more people have died from Covid after being vaccinated than have died from Covid after having gained natural immunity. Meaning they survived the first infection, got infected again, and then died from that second infection.
> The vaccine makes the death complications less likely. You might still get Covid after being vaccinated, but you probably won’t get the full vascular infection if you were vaccinated beforehand. That’s all I mean.
I have no idea why this is a topic of debate, no doubt there's some wording error, hooray English. I don't really have anything else to say so I'll leave y'all to it.
Could you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for a different kind of site than that, and you've unfortunately been doing a lot of it.
I'm not responsible for flamebait by expressing my opinion. Maybe the moderation system is to be overhauled to account for more diverse opinions ? I observed when I tell things half the time I get points half the time I get downvoted.
Are one-sided debates more fun ? Yes, if you want a reflexion of yourself in a mirror.
In any case I don't try to be this way intentionnally.
Is free speech still a thing ?
In any case if my opinion is not needed here I will go spend energy elsewhere. Community can be toxic and it's becoming the case here.
Re-reading all my comments I stand firm, no aggression there, just opinions.
> I'm not responsible for flamebait by expressing my opinion.
We're trying to be a specific kind of site. For that we need people to post in a certain way: thoughtfully, respectfully, substantively. If you post that way, you're making a positive contribution. If you don't post that way, then you're contributing to destroying this place (for its intended purpose), which is not in your interest, because the community and culture here are what makes HN worth participating in in the first place.
I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or dump motor oil in a mountain lake, right? You'd treat those resources carefully because you know how valuable they are, and how we all have to hold them in common. It's like that here. I don't see that as an "expressing my opinion" issue—if someone dumped motor oil in a mountain lake and you asked them about it and they said "this is how I express myself", that would not be persuasive.
People tend to vastly underestimate the damage they cause (let's say 10x) and vastly overestimate the damage that other people cause (let's say another 10x), which leads to a 100x bias in evaluating these things. That's why everyone feels innocent and aggrieved and why it's so obvious that other people are the problem. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear!
If you're interested in reading a much longer explanation, here is an exchange I had with another user who was in a similar situation a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161491. I took a lot of time to write that out (it's basically an essay) because this comes up fairly regularly. The point is that the issue isn't really a moral one ("don't say bad things") - it's an optimization problem ("how do we sustain an internet forum that doesn't suck"). If you understand that then maybe you'll feel less like the moderation here is against you.
Yes, if that different poster believed the same thing.
There is a whole army of people out there who have a serious problem with accepting reality and it is useful to point out that someone is arguing with someone else who does not accept reality as it is commonly experienced. That saves everybody time, just like we don't feed the trolls we also should not waste cycles on engaging people who refuse to accept evidence anyway. Think of it as a PSA rather than an ad-hominem attack, you are assuming that the argument was brought in good faith, I don't.
Once one has acquired immunity that way, what practical and moral case is there to force them to also take a vaccine which may not add significantly more protection and may cause other problems?
If the naturally immunity wanes quickly then that would be a good reason. Having said that, I do agree that advice and regulations around vaccination ought to be different for those who have previously been infected with the disease.
We can split hairs about which one wanes fastest, but it's not like vaccine provided immunity is bullet-proof or lasts forever: As of 10/4, COVID19 cases resulting in death or requiring hospitalization are up to 1/10,000 among the fully vaccinated and the trend has been going in the wrong direction for a while.
What case is there to refuse a vaccine that is likely to add significantly more protection to the individual and community while remaining extremely unlikely to cause “other problems “?
It’s important to distinguish events that are likely from those which are unlikely. Otherwise you may mislead someone.
Please some arguments to back up your claim.
Why are they publishing this ? Because vaccine-induced immunity is zilch. Gone after 2 months.
Furthermore the strategy used is very dangerous that's why there are so many side effects of this gene therapy.
Because you transform your own cells into an enemy to the immune system, triggering apoptosis.
Also, the spike protein is destroying the blood vessels and the acquired immunity is not long-lasting and not competent vs. new variants.
I'll add some references if you're interested.
I'm not worried, those affirmations will stand the test of time (not like many retracted studies that have driven ridiculous policies).
> .. our analysis revealed significant qualitative differences between the two types of immune challenges. In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients. Increased interferon signaling likely contributed to the observed dramatic upregulation of cytotoxic genes in the peripheral T cells and innate-like lymphocytes in patients but not in immunized subjects. Analysis of B and T cell receptor repertoires revealed that while the majority of clonal B and T cells in COVID-19 patients were effector cells, in vaccine recipients clonally expanded cells were primarily circulating memory cells. Importantly, the divergence in immune subsets engaged, the transcriptional differences in key immune populations, and the differences in maturation of adaptive immune cells revealed by our analysis have far-ranging implications for immunity to this novel pathogen.
Maybe I missed it from the article, but for persons who were both infected and vaccinated, did they only study persons who were infected before vaccinated?
Just curious if the order of those two events matters.
I've been thinking about this lately with regard to my very young child. There's been a lot of discussion lately about lowering the age at which the mRNA vaccinations can be given. But if it's true that natural immunity + vaccination) is stronger than vaccination alone, is it worth it to leave her unvaccinated against Covid, at least for now, in order to get some natural immunity?
My friends and family are sort of aghast at that, but I can't get a good read on how dangerous Covid is for little children. As far as I can tell from the stats, hardly any 1-4 year olds have died from Covid (60 in about two years [0]), so it doesn't seem like a big risk. Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place. (I'm not seeing lots of folks with "long covid" who had it asymptomatic to begin with, for example.)
There's the argument about getting vaccinated to help others but I don't think that really applies here. Asking babies to "take one for the team" (in the context of my question here where immediate vaccination inhibits long term protection) for grandma seems kind of backwards, if you ask me.
i wonder how many people were asymptomatic and thus weren't even aware. maybe those long-covid symptoms get diagnosed as something else if there is no known previous infection.
I wouldn't be so cavalier in assuming that just because you don't die that everything is A-OK and you're 100% fine. Viral infections can do damage that isn't apparent until years later. For example, it's now well-established that HPV infection causes cervical cancer later in life, and HPV is basically symptom-free.
Chicken pox/varicella is another disease to which a lot of children gained natural immunity prior to vaccination being an option (“chicken pox parties” were still a thing when I was a kid in the 90s). We now know that the virus can lay dormant for years after the initial infection and come back later in life as shingles which, while not deadly, can be extremely painful and debilitating.
Nobody claimed COVID could lay dormant as a specific mechanism, but rather that it could cause unexpected long-term damage that diminishes quality-of-life and yet isn't caught in shallow "did they die Y/N" analysis.
For the studies I've read, most long term damage appears to be caused by viral concentrations in disparate organs, as a result of uncontrolled infection (i.e. insufficient natural or vaccinated immune system effectiveness to keep it under control).
From reasoning, kids have stronger innate immune systems, but weaker adaptive immune systems, so we shouldn't see as many "runaway COVID" cases with organ damage, because the infection is blunted by their initial, innate response.
That said, if kids end up being an unvaccinated population for SARS-CoV-2... well, that's playing dice with evolution.
That doesn't answer the question. Yes kids have more effective innate immune response. But the vaccinated population can also serve as hosts for potentially evolving new variants. We've been playing dice with evolution of the other 4 endemic coronaviruses for centuries with no vaccines and so far nothing catastrophic has happened. Other than speculative fear mongering about what could happen, is there any actual scientific evidence to expect that SARS-CoV-2 will follow a different evolutionary trajectory?
> We've been playing dice with evolution of the other 4 endemic coronaviruses for centuries with no vaccines and so far nothing catastrophic has happened.
SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV?
> is there any actual scientific evidence to expect that SARS-CoV-2 will follow a different evolutionary trajectory?
SARS-CoV-2 is now in more hosts than any other endemic coronavirus, due to its higher transmission rates. About half (~48% with single dose) of the world is now vaccinated (mostly in wealthy countries). Effectively zero children younger than 12 are vaccinated.
Vaccination produces a body that's much more resistant to replication, via viral suppression by the immune system.
Consequently, we're increasing the difficulty of SARS-CoV-2 reproducing in adults, while holding the difficulty of doing so in children constant.
You'd be foolish not to consider that risky from an evolutionary perspective.
Now most of us still get infected with OC43 at some point in our lives. There is no vaccine. The resulting natural immunity protects us as we age. The virus has had plenty of opportunity to evolve more dangerous variants but hasn't done so.
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they can, but you'd be foolish to think that significantly reduces the risk of a more dangerous mutation.
As someone who had shingles in their late 20s, it's not fun, but not awful either. Admittedly, apparently it's worse for the elderly.
On a 0 (feel fine) - 5 (2nd degree sunburn over a wide body area) - 10 (fractured rib) scale, I'd put it at a 6. And ran about 4 days before symptoms abated.
It felt a lot like really bad sunburn, to the extent that clothing (jeans) against my skin was exhausting and movement avoided. Was on the road at the time with a client, so would work all day, then get back to the hotel and immediately go to sleep.
As someone who has had shingles in my left eye for the last 4 years, I can tell you it's not something to mess around with. I didn't get the vaccine because everyone kept telling me to get it when I turned 60. Unfortunately, it decided to come out when I was 57.
I'm still on steroid eyedrops and take 2g of antiviral medicine every day to keep it somewhat in check.
Yes. The risk of this is pretty miniscule I think.
> Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place.
Not so much. I'm in a facebook group for long covid sufferers (and anyone who is interested), and there are quite a few people saying their children are suffering from long covid symptoms (less severe in absolute terms compared to adults due to higher baseline energy in children, but still significantly affecting their lives).
I've heard +10% of people are getting long covid, and that it doesn't correlate strongly with the severity of the disease.
Overall I think it is a little tricky to judge with kids. One thing I would add that you may not have considered is that being vaccinated doesn't necessarily preclude gaining natural immunity in future.
> is it worth it to leave her unvaccinated against Covid, at least for now, in order to get some natural immunity?
I have wondered the same, but my uneducated conclusion is that sequencing is important. I want the first exposure to be controlled (e.g. vax) and not random in dosage, etc. So vax and then natural exposure is what I believe to be the ideal order.
Vaccine is second best for most cohorts, because it comes with fewer side effects and the side effects typically aren't as bad.
Natural immunity is strong, but for most cohorts is more likely to have side effects compared to a vaccine.
Furthermore, the risk of side effects from COVID are lower if you are vaccinated. Therefore, given that breakthrough cases are still possible, I would suggest vaccinating first, then if they get it they get it and at least you get hybrid immunity in an order that is less risky than natural immunity followed by a vaccine.
For children, all of this is murkier. Also, if the likelihood of you catching Covid is low enough, there's absolutely no point getting vaccinated.
Over a long enough timeline, the likelihood of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people catching SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) is essentially 100%. Vaccination significantly reduces the risk of severe COVID-19 (the clinical disease) symptoms, at least for a while.
We are pretty much in agreement. My point was that the OPs statement that there is no point in getting a vaccine if you are not going to get COVID was nonsense.
The problem in my opinion is accumulating lung tissue damage over a lifetime. I
If you have one covid infection per year with long damage, your life expectancy and quality drops quite a bit, even if covid is not killing you. The damage may only be perceivable to athletes and in later years though.
I think that one argument that does hold some weight is that each new infection is an opportunity for a new mutation and a new variant. This variant could be milder or it could be worse (delta). So in that view, vaccinating young children reduces the risk for all of us of a new variant arising that is much more infectious or even escapes the natural or vaccine induced immunity.
All that being said, one reason I live HN is that this question can be asked in a respectful manner and hopefully garner reasonable and respectful responses. Any other site this would turn into a flame war in 0.2us
I would encourage people to get vaccinated if they can, however we don't have strong evidence that this will reduce the risk of more dangerous variants. Vaccinated people can still get infected. They may clear the infection a little faster on average but the reduction is limited and temporary.
Immunocompromised patients are a more likely source of new variants. They can suffer persistent infections giving the virus much more opportunity to evolve. Vaccination is less effective in such patients.
The Delta variant is already so infectious that it's probably already close to a local evolutionary maximum. Measles has a higher R0 but it's genetically very different.
There are 4 other endemic human coronaviruses including HCoV-OC43, another beta coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2. It probably caused a worldwide pandemic that killed a lot of people in 1889, and still frequently kills frail elderly patients today. We don't have a vaccine for it and most of us probably get infected at some point in our lives. Yet even though it's had over a century to evolve it hasn't become dangerous to youths.
So here’s my logic but sounds a bit different than yours…
While vaccinated people can be infected, the rate of infection is significantly reduced and therefore fewer opportunities for the virus to mutate.
But if the primary originator of variants are immunocompromised people then this wouldn’t be such a benefit.
Fundamentally, very viral replication has a similar probability of a mutation happening and so therefore (it seems to me) that immunocompromised people are only more likely to generate new variants bc their infections last so much longer. Is this correct?
The reduction in rate of infection for vaccinated people is limited and temporary. Over the long run vaccination will not significantly reduce opportunities for the virus to mutate. The real benefit of vaccination is reducing the risk of severe symptoms.
Yes infections do tend to persist longer in immunocompromised patients with more total viral replication events over time and thus greater chance of a successful mutation. In addition there may be greater odds of recombination due to simultaneous infection with multiple strains, however that's somewhat speculative and I don't think it has been definitively detected.
Immediate vaccination does not inhibit long term protection. If the vaccine efficacy wanes to a significant degree (which is not a given for each individual), then you are still in a better place than having never been vaccinated. The safest way to get covid is as a vaccinated person. Not the other way round. There is no "tak[ing] one for the team" here.
The immune system is more complicated than that. I have no answer on what the correct strategy is, but I contest the blanket statement that taking the vaccine has zero impact on long term protection. We need actual long term data and actual control populations.
You want her to get infected first so she then has stronger protection... against getting infected again? Compared to having protection for the (potential) first infection (which would also extremely likely lead to a hybrid immunity afterwards, if it doesn't prevent an infection entirely)? I struggle to see the scenario where that's helpful.
> But if it's true that natural immunity + vaccination) is stronger than vaccination alone, is it worth it to leave her unvaccinated against Covid, at least for now, in order to get some natural immunity
No? If she does not get infected after vaccination the job is done. The goal is not 'theoretical maximum protection' the job is 'not getting sick'.
If she gets infected after vaccination (very possible), she will have less risk during infection and have improved protection after.
Vaccination first and then infection is definitely safer than the other way around.
Ofc the risk for young children is low either way, so going with the low risk of being unvaccinated might be something you are ok with.
But getting infected to get best protection against infection is kinda backwards.
Parent's goal is theoretical maximum protection. To which there appears to be a difference between infection + vaccination, vs vaccination + infection.
But the point is, if you're trying to get maximum protection from infection (the implicit being the damage that is caused from being infected), getting infected first seems to truly miss the point of the goal. You're taking on all of the risk of getting infected, in an effort toward lowering the risk of being infected.
Denmark and Sweden use Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. Iceland uses those and AZ. Finland uses those and others.
When you've got 3 or more effective vaccines in use, it is reasonable to pause one to investigate it even thought its risk is tiny if it looks like that tiny risk might not be as tiny as the tiny risks from the others.
If your child is vaccinated - there is a lower chance she gets COVID-19 - the disease. And if she does get it - it will be milder. But she may not get it at all with the vaccine just because the immune system is trained to eliminate it upon entry. In the assumption that vaccine does not have any side effects, the strategy to vaccinate is strictly dominating in game theoretic sense.
Let alone the fact that she has much lesser chance of being the spreader.
I would not vaccinate my child with an mRNA vaccine unless the consequences of not doing so would negatively affect their lives (cannot attend school in person, prevented from extracurriculars, etc.). At the end of the day it is still an experimental treatment with unknown side effects one year out, but more so because getting sick and allowing their body's natural immune system to do its job is part and parcel of being human. I would not want my children growing up with immune systems that are dependent on man-made vaccines/treatments when the statistics undoubtedly bear out the fact that children's immune system are far and away more than capable of fighting off Covid-19.
Obviously the above all goes out the window if your child has chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, or nervous system disorders that make them highly susceptible to complications from viral infections.
You're not alone. We sent our K and 1st grade children back to school this fall expecting them to get (possibly asymptomatic) COVID at some point during the year. We're actually counting our blessings that this hit while they're at an age when they are likely to get some natural immunity without serious health complications. My wife and I are vaccinated, so hopefully any household contagion would be / will be moderate.
My impulse is that you’re trading one thing where the long term side effects are not 100% known (mrna vaccine) for two things where the long term side effects are not 100% known (covid and the mrna vaccine), and that there’s substantially more reason to believe long covid is a thing than that there are long term side effects to the vaccine.
Bigger issue though is that there’s no way to know exactly how long natural immunity will be effective either, as we know it also can wane in regards to this coronavirus. Giving a child covid now may be pointless to the goal of giving stronger protection to a more problematic strain later, if the strain comes along after the natural immunity has faded.
Realistically though, given current stats, the only statically valid reason to get babies vaccinated is to help lower community spread. Whether that’s asking a baby to “take one for the team” or reasonable depends on how much of a risk you view the vaccine as to children given the current data. (My personal belief is that long covid is a marginally higher risk than vaccine side effects so there’s no reason not to also lower community spread, but there’s no reason to think the baby won’t be fine either way).
We'll be vaccinating our young kids as soon as FDA provides EUA. If it's approved then it's safer than doing nothing in their age group. The risks of infection with no vax, vaccinated infection, or reinfection ("natural immunity") are all tiny in kids; we're more interested in protecting the grownups they spend their time around.
One angle that I don't see discussed a lot is what parents will plan to do if ACIP doesn't recommend any SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for very young kids (i.e. not until they're 5+ or maybe even 12+). It's very possible they could find the tiny risks from vaccination outweigh the tiny risks from infection.
There could in principle be an interesting moral question. If vaccinating very young kids is almost but not quite harmless -- like it raises their risk of mortality from the equivalent of driving 100 road miles to driving 110 road miles -- but it dramatically reduces the risk that their adult caregivers will die, should they be vaccinated? If ACIP ends up looking at the data and saying that vaccinating the youngest kids is worse I don't think I'll be giving them a non-approved vaccine. I can see why people would do it, though; the magnitude of the risks could be similar to those incurred with air travel as a lap infant vs. being secured in a carseat.
When you look at small children data, mind that there are some very high risk children out there. "Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid. [...] Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities." Another example, on TWiV 811 Dr. Daniel Griffin stated that risk of hospitalization is 4x for children with Down syndrome.
Where I get unease is the fact that there is no long term data of vaccine safety and effectiveness, in spite of the constant barrage of officials implying the contrary. What is the best path for kids to grow up, have their own children and have to ask themselves the same question? Is the answer 25 booster shots, one each year? How do vaccines interact with long term immune system? What about variants that have not evolved yet? We don't know.
Some choose 'if it ain't broken, don't fix it'. Some choose to put their faith in vaccines, 'the vaccine definitely helps in the short term, and there are minuscule downsides'. Some Amish refuse the vaccine on principle. Given the limited information we have, not sure there is a guaranteed right answer.
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) was first identified in April 2020 by doctors at children’s hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom. The condition has also been called pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome (PIMS). MIS-C is an illness that can occur after COVID-19 infection and affects mostly school-age children. While the syndrome is rare, it can be dangerous.
From 2020 to October 6th 2021, there were 58,167 deaths in the age group 0-17. 499 of those deaths are related to COVID-19. That's 0.86% (or: 99.99% of deaths happened due to other causes) [1]
The leading cause of deaths in this age group are accidents [2]. A lot of these accidents are preventable [3].
PSA: The pharmaceutical companies are serial felons that have paid out billions in lost suits. Please question the integrity of the information coming through. I think it's pretty uniformly accepted that big tobacco used to have scientists shilling for them. What's different this time? There are trillions to be made.
There's a lot of moral hazard here. The weaker the vaccine, and the greater the dismissal of natural immunity (which according to Israeli hospital data [1] is completely superior to vaccination), the greater the profit for big pharma.
The dystopian outcome is that we basically outsource/financialise the human immune system - and that 6-monthly COVID booster shots will be forced (/mandated) on everyone, forever.
The ideal outcome is that we immediately drop all COVID restrictions and just bundle these booster shots into influenza vaccinations for the immunocompromised and those aged 70+
There is substantial evidence that the vaccines make a first infection less dangerous and not really much evidence that they inhibit later immunity, so you might want to take a step back and reexamine things.
I just don’t understand the whole natural immunity vs vaccine debate. If you want natural immunity the safest way to achieve that is be to have a breakthrough infection after being vaccinated.
My guess is that maybe people overestimate the risk of getting the vaccine? But that also seems to be crazy since COVID has killed over over half a million people in the US and over 1/3 of the US population has taken the vaccine and been fine - the most common bad reaction is being wiped out for a day.
The difficulty is that the immune system is not linear. I am far from being an expert, but terms like ADE and original antigenic sin are part of the literature. This is not to say which approach is better, it is only a caveat that thinking in additive terms is just an approximation.
People were worried about something like a dengue fever effect before we knew much about COVID. But now we have tons of data on breakthrough infections and and reinfections and it all says that immunity acquired via vaccine or prior exposure to the virus drastically reduces the risk of hospitalization or death in the case of a new infection.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadAnother study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04005-0?f
The problem with natural immunity is that it can be so variable. Some people would develop better immunity from being infected than they would from just the vaccine, but some would develop much weaker immunity from the infection.
And some will develop autoimmune disorders. The mRNA vaccines being highly specific is an important safety feature.
If you took those same people, and magically made them immunologically naive, they would fare better than a random sample.
If thats the case, and those are confirmed with PCR test, then we are catastrafucked. In the UK double infections are pretty rare. Given the routine level of testing (~1million tests a day) I'd expect to see some sort of indication or worry from the statisticians.
> a couple of which I know are fully vaccinated.
Again, I'd expect this to see some level of data to support double infections in vaccinated people with "normal" immune systems. I'd expect to see that data in the UK or Israel, possibly south korea as well.
I'm sure it happens, but at a scale that we would see in a normal office, suggests something really quite common. But I can't find evidence to support that (I have a lot of doctor friends, who'd i'd expect to get re-infected, especially as they have been more lax with the little PPE they have. )
They found a "suspected" reinfection rate at 270 days of 0.8% so yeah, it's pretty rare.
The last 2 outbreaks have been among the exact same group of people: the office bible study group. That group meets at least once a week in close quarters for an hour or two at a time.
As of right now, at least 5 of the people that are currently out and have positive PCR tests have had it at least one other time in the last three to four months, with another positive PCR test to confirm. Our company requires everyone send in their proof of a negative or positive tests each time they're taken, and you cannot return to work until it's been submitted.
Original: Sorry, are you arguing that the vaccine has killed more people than the virus? Because there's no way you have numbers that actually support that. Given that there are now far more vaccinated than infected in America, you'd need to find near on a million vaccine deaths.
Can you cite nay sources for that conclusion?
> The vaccine makes the death complications less likely. You might still get Covid after being vaccinated, but you probably won’t get the full vascular infection if you were vaccinated beforehand. That’s all I mean.
I have no idea why this is a topic of debate, no doubt there's some wording error, hooray English. I don't really have anything else to say so I'll leave y'all to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27975053
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not responsible for flamebait by expressing my opinion. Maybe the moderation system is to be overhauled to account for more diverse opinions ? I observed when I tell things half the time I get points half the time I get downvoted.
Are one-sided debates more fun ? Yes, if you want a reflexion of yourself in a mirror.
In any case I don't try to be this way intentionnally.
Is free speech still a thing ?
In any case if my opinion is not needed here I will go spend energy elsewhere. Community can be toxic and it's becoming the case here.
Re-reading all my comments I stand firm, no aggression there, just opinions.
Best regards, I know your work is very hard !
We're trying to be a specific kind of site. For that we need people to post in a certain way: thoughtfully, respectfully, substantively. If you post that way, you're making a positive contribution. If you don't post that way, then you're contributing to destroying this place (for its intended purpose), which is not in your interest, because the community and culture here are what makes HN worth participating in in the first place.
I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or dump motor oil in a mountain lake, right? You'd treat those resources carefully because you know how valuable they are, and how we all have to hold them in common. It's like that here. I don't see that as an "expressing my opinion" issue—if someone dumped motor oil in a mountain lake and you asked them about it and they said "this is how I express myself", that would not be persuasive.
People tend to vastly underestimate the damage they cause (let's say 10x) and vastly overestimate the damage that other people cause (let's say another 10x), which leads to a 100x bias in evaluating these things. That's why everyone feels innocent and aggrieved and why it's so obvious that other people are the problem. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear!
If you're interested in reading a much longer explanation, here is an exchange I had with another user who was in a similar situation a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161491. I took a lot of time to write that out (it's basically an essay) because this comes up fairly regularly. The point is that the issue isn't really a moral one ("don't say bad things") - it's an optimization problem ("how do we sustain an internet forum that doesn't suck"). If you understand that then maybe you'll feel less like the moderation here is against you.
Who the poster is and what they've said in the past are completely irrelevant.
Good rule of thumb: Would the rebuttal remain the same if responding to a different poster? If no, then the rebuttal is probably an ad hominem.
There is a whole army of people out there who have a serious problem with accepting reality and it is useful to point out that someone is arguing with someone else who does not accept reality as it is commonly experienced. That saves everybody time, just like we don't feed the trolls we also should not waste cycles on engaging people who refuse to accept evidence anyway. Think of it as a PSA rather than an ad-hominem attack, you are assuming that the argument was brought in good faith, I don't.
[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/vaccine-breakthrough/
It’s important to distinguish events that are likely from those which are unlikely. Otherwise you may mislead someone.
> .. our analysis revealed significant qualitative differences between the two types of immune challenges. In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients. Increased interferon signaling likely contributed to the observed dramatic upregulation of cytotoxic genes in the peripheral T cells and innate-like lymphocytes in patients but not in immunized subjects. Analysis of B and T cell receptor repertoires revealed that while the majority of clonal B and T cells in COVID-19 patients were effector cells, in vaccine recipients clonally expanded cells were primarily circulating memory cells. Importantly, the divergence in immune subsets engaged, the transcriptional differences in key immune populations, and the differences in maturation of adaptive immune cells revealed by our analysis have far-ranging implications for immunity to this novel pathogen.
Just curious if the order of those two events matters.
My friends and family are sort of aghast at that, but I can't get a good read on how dangerous Covid is for little children. As far as I can tell from the stats, hardly any 1-4 year olds have died from Covid (60 in about two years [0]), so it doesn't seem like a big risk. Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place. (I'm not seeing lots of folks with "long covid" who had it asymptomatic to begin with, for example.)
There's the argument about getting vaccinated to help others but I don't think that really applies here. Asking babies to "take one for the team" (in the context of my question here where immediate vaccination inhibits long term protection) for grandma seems kind of backwards, if you ask me.
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku
From reasoning, kids have stronger innate immune systems, but weaker adaptive immune systems, so we shouldn't see as many "runaway COVID" cases with organ damage, because the infection is blunted by their initial, innate response.
That said, if kids end up being an unvaccinated population for SARS-CoV-2... well, that's playing dice with evolution.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-19-will-just-end-up...
> We've been playing dice with evolution of the other 4 endemic coronaviruses for centuries with no vaccines and so far nothing catastrophic has happened.
SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV?
> is there any actual scientific evidence to expect that SARS-CoV-2 will follow a different evolutionary trajectory?
SARS-CoV-2 is now in more hosts than any other endemic coronavirus, due to its higher transmission rates. About half (~48% with single dose) of the world is now vaccinated (mostly in wealthy countries). Effectively zero children younger than 12 are vaccinated.
Vaccination produces a body that's much more resistant to replication, via viral suppression by the immune system.
Consequently, we're increasing the difficulty of SARS-CoV-2 reproducing in adults, while holding the difficulty of doing so in children constant.
You'd be foolish not to consider that risky from an evolutionary perspective.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S006535271...)
In particular OC43 is a beta coronavirus genetically close to SARS-CoV-2. It is suspected to have caused the 1889 pandemic.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175...
Now most of us still get infected with OC43 at some point in our lives. There is no vaccine. The resulting natural immunity protects us as we age. The virus has had plenty of opportunity to evolve more dangerous variants but hasn't done so.
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they can, but you'd be foolish to think that significantly reduces the risk of a more dangerous mutation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
On a 0 (feel fine) - 5 (2nd degree sunburn over a wide body area) - 10 (fractured rib) scale, I'd put it at a 6. And ran about 4 days before symptoms abated.
It felt a lot like really bad sunburn, to the extent that clothing (jeans) against my skin was exhausting and movement avoided. Was on the road at the time with a client, so would work all day, then get back to the hotel and immediately go to sleep.
I'm still on steroid eyedrops and take 2g of antiviral medicine every day to keep it somewhat in check.
Yes. The risk of this is pretty miniscule I think.
> Of course, there's "long covid" and all the sort of long tail risks and concerns, but intuitively it feels like if the disease is not that deadly and dangerous when you're that young, there'd also be less risk of all these other side effects we're seeing, which tend to correlate, as far as I can tell, with how severe the disease was for the person in the first place.
Not so much. I'm in a facebook group for long covid sufferers (and anyone who is interested), and there are quite a few people saying their children are suffering from long covid symptoms (less severe in absolute terms compared to adults due to higher baseline energy in children, but still significantly affecting their lives).
I've heard +10% of people are getting long covid, and that it doesn't correlate strongly with the severity of the disease.
Overall I think it is a little tricky to judge with kids. One thing I would add that you may not have considered is that being vaccinated doesn't necessarily preclude gaining natural immunity in future.
I have wondered the same, but my uneducated conclusion is that sequencing is important. I want the first exposure to be controlled (e.g. vax) and not random in dosage, etc. So vax and then natural exposure is what I believe to be the ideal order.
Hybrid immunity is next best (natural + vaccine).
Vaccine is second best for most cohorts, because it comes with fewer side effects and the side effects typically aren't as bad.
Natural immunity is strong, but for most cohorts is more likely to have side effects compared to a vaccine.
Furthermore, the risk of side effects from COVID are lower if you are vaccinated. Therefore, given that breakthrough cases are still possible, I would suggest vaccinating first, then if they get it they get it and at least you get hybrid immunity in an order that is less risky than natural immunity followed by a vaccine.
For children, all of this is murkier. Also, if the likelihood of you catching Covid is low enough, there's absolutely no point getting vaccinated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
That’s a very generous and evenhanded way to say that
Get the vaccine first and then natural immunity should a breakthrough infection occur. Seems like a much safer way to go about it.
If you have one covid infection per year with long damage, your life expectancy and quality drops quite a bit, even if covid is not killing you. The damage may only be perceivable to athletes and in later years though.
All that being said, one reason I live HN is that this question can be asked in a respectful manner and hopefully garner reasonable and respectful responses. Any other site this would turn into a flame war in 0.2us
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
Immunocompromised patients are a more likely source of new variants. They can suffer persistent infections giving the virus much more opportunity to evolve. Vaccination is less effective in such patients.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2104756
The Delta variant is already so infectious that it's probably already close to a local evolutionary maximum. Measles has a higher R0 but it's genetically very different.
There are 4 other endemic human coronaviruses including HCoV-OC43, another beta coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2. It probably caused a worldwide pandemic that killed a lot of people in 1889, and still frequently kills frail elderly patients today. We don't have a vaccine for it and most of us probably get infected at some point in our lives. Yet even though it's had over a century to evolve it hasn't become dangerous to youths.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34254725/
While vaccinated people can be infected, the rate of infection is significantly reduced and therefore fewer opportunities for the virus to mutate.
But if the primary originator of variants are immunocompromised people then this wouldn’t be such a benefit.
Fundamentally, very viral replication has a similar probability of a mutation happening and so therefore (it seems to me) that immunocompromised people are only more likely to generate new variants bc their infections last so much longer. Is this correct?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
Yes infections do tend to persist longer in immunocompromised patients with more total viral replication events over time and thus greater chance of a successful mutation. In addition there may be greater odds of recombination due to simultaneous infection with multiple strains, however that's somewhat speculative and I don't think it has been definitively detected.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8220957/
On the doctrine of original antigenic sin
https://www.jstor.org/stable/985534
Original Antigenic Sin: How First Exposure Shapes Lifelong Anti–Influenza Virus Immune Responses
https://www.jimmunol.org/content/202/2/335
Original Antigenic Sin: the Downside of Immunological Memory and Implications for COVID-19
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00056-21
No? If she does not get infected after vaccination the job is done. The goal is not 'theoretical maximum protection' the job is 'not getting sick'.
If she gets infected after vaccination (very possible), she will have less risk during infection and have improved protection after.
Vaccination first and then infection is definitely safer than the other way around.
Ofc the risk for young children is low either way, so going with the low risk of being unvaccinated might be something you are ok with.
But getting infected to get best protection against infection is kinda backwards.
Is "theoretical maximum protection" really the goal?
Denmark and Sweden use Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. Iceland uses those and AZ. Finland uses those and others.
When you've got 3 or more effective vaccines in use, it is reasonable to pause one to investigate it even thought its risk is tiny if it looks like that tiny risk might not be as tiny as the tiny risks from the others.
Let alone the fact that she has much lesser chance of being the spreader.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
Obviously the above all goes out the window if your child has chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, or nervous system disorders that make them highly susceptible to complications from viral infections.
Bigger issue though is that there’s no way to know exactly how long natural immunity will be effective either, as we know it also can wane in regards to this coronavirus. Giving a child covid now may be pointless to the goal of giving stronger protection to a more problematic strain later, if the strain comes along after the natural immunity has faded.
Realistically though, given current stats, the only statically valid reason to get babies vaccinated is to help lower community spread. Whether that’s asking a baby to “take one for the team” or reasonable depends on how much of a risk you view the vaccine as to children given the current data. (My personal belief is that long covid is a marginally higher risk than vaccine side effects so there’s no reason not to also lower community spread, but there’s no reason to think the baby won’t be fine either way).
One angle that I don't see discussed a lot is what parents will plan to do if ACIP doesn't recommend any SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for very young kids (i.e. not until they're 5+ or maybe even 12+). It's very possible they could find the tiny risks from vaccination outweigh the tiny risks from infection.
There could in principle be an interesting moral question. If vaccinating very young kids is almost but not quite harmless -- like it raises their risk of mortality from the equivalent of driving 100 road miles to driving 110 road miles -- but it dramatically reduces the risk that their adult caregivers will die, should they be vaccinated? If ACIP ends up looking at the data and saying that vaccinating the youngest kids is worse I don't think I'll be giving them a non-approved vaccine. I can see why people would do it, though; the magnitude of the risks could be similar to those incurred with air travel as a lap infant vs. being secured in a carseat.
That's a lot of faith in a group currently suffering from brain & morality drainage due to.....
When you look at small children data, mind that there are some very high risk children out there. "Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid. [...] Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities." Another example, on TWiV 811 Dr. Daniel Griffin stated that risk of hospitalization is 4x for children with Down syndrome.
Where I get unease is the fact that there is no long term data of vaccine safety and effectiveness, in spite of the constant barrage of officials implying the contrary. What is the best path for kids to grow up, have their own children and have to ask themselves the same question? Is the answer 25 booster shots, one each year? How do vaccines interact with long term immune system? What about variants that have not evolved yet? We don't know.
Some choose 'if it ain't broken, don't fix it'. Some choose to put their faith in vaccines, 'the vaccine definitely helps in the short term, and there are minuscule downsides'. Some Amish refuse the vaccine on principle. Given the limited information we have, not sure there is a guaranteed right answer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-811
Isn't the point of immunity against COVID to prevent COVID? What's the logic of getting COVID to get immunity against COVID?
The leading cause of deaths in this age group are accidents [2]. A lot of these accidents are preventable [3].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/child-health.htm
[3] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/first-aid-and-safety/safe...
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/resources/largest-pharmaceutica...
edit I realise that the above jab isn't mRNA. however I don't think thats entirely relevant to the point.
The dystopian outcome is that we basically outsource/financialise the human immune system - and that 6-monthly COVID booster shots will be forced (/mandated) on everyone, forever.
The ideal outcome is that we immediately drop all COVID restrictions and just bundle these booster shots into influenza vaccinations for the immunocompromised and those aged 70+
https://youtu.be/9bamaEMftg4
My guess is that maybe people overestimate the risk of getting the vaccine? But that also seems to be crazy since COVID has killed over over half a million people in the US and over 1/3 of the US population has taken the vaccine and been fine - the most common bad reaction is being wiped out for a day.