Read carefully. The immunity for people after both catching covid AND getting vaccinated is higher than those just getting vaccinated (without catching covid first).
Yes but there's also plenty of evidence to suggest that simply getting covid is enough to get better immunity against future infection. This article leads you to believe that it's recovering from covid + getting vaccinated == super-immunity, but I suspect the "getting vaccinated" part is not the significant factor in this equation.
> Yes but there's also plenty of evidence to suggest that simply getting covid is enough to get better immunity against future infection.
The immunity conferred by getting COVID is quite variable from person to person, with some getting strong immunity and some getting little immunity depending on the particulars of their particular infection [1].
I don’t think there are many wheel guns that would give you 249,999/250,000 odds of survival. The number of people killed or injured by mRNA treatments is also not zero.
Sure tell that to the families of those who died from COVID19. Getting vaccinated is a much better way to get protection from COVID. I knew quite some folks who were hit by COVID twice, tell them that they were better off suffering through COVID twice instead of relying on the vaccine.
If I told you that it's extremely unlikely that you would die by rhino attack while going on a vacation to southern Africa, and your answer to that was "tell that to the family of X random guy who got trampled to death", as a reason for why you think i'm insane for saying you shouldn't be paranoid about African vacations, your argument would be obviously derided for being obsessive about focusing on only one abnormal thing. But apply the same logic to COVID and suddenly you think it's perfectly valid. It isn't. The vast majority of people who get the illness recover completely, and if you exclude the elderly, the statistical odds of recovery increase immensely. For the very young, they really are in the range of hundreds of thousands to one against dying.
Yeah poor analogy here, you can choose to not go to Southern Africa, you cannot will for COVID to not infect you. Why should we not be eager for vaccines when they are available for such a highly infectious disease.
Flip the scenario, during the second wave in India, we were one of the few families in our neighborhood who were lucky that no family members caught COVID. All the local hospitals were filled, a large number of people we know survived but there were people who died around 4-5% of the people we knew who were infected and 40% who came very close to dying. The Delta variant arrived when a significant part of the elderly population had been vaccinated. You should recheck the your stats about the elderly, the second wave was brutal to under 40 folks as a good number of above 40 people had been vaccinated by the time the second wave hit.
Sure COVID might have a low fatality rate of 2-3% but 2-3% of a very huge population getting infected by a rapidly infectious disease is still a humungous number.
I have no idea where you got your 2-3% fatality rate for COVID from but it's way off the mark. That is the CFR in certain high risk circumstances but the known IFR of the virus after nearly 2 years of study and data collation has been fairly reasonably established by multiple health agencies. Not surprised by the numbers you use though... CDC Best estimates as of March 2021, For all but the very oldest population segments it's well below 1% across all age groups that are not very elderly. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
For 20-30-somethings that probably read a pop-dev news aggregator? Probably not. Or are most of us in our 80s? There is also substantial variation in reported IFR between political jurisdictions per the CDC (1-9% I think). Seroprevalence based IFR estimates tend to be consistent across national boundaries (and is a much lower number), but I wouldn’t make so bold as to tell you to believe research studies over political appointees at the CDC.
I think the hope is to market pharmaceutical products to people who do not currently see a benefit to them given their naturally acquired antibodies. Large quantities of product is expiring soon, and market share must be expanded as quickly as possible to avoid that cost.
People seem to think that there's just one antibody that everybody shares when they are vaccinated or develop natural immunity. You can readily develop different sets of antibodies from separate exposure events.
The better diversity of antibodies you have against a target, you get compounding synergistic protection and protection against mutational escape on the part of the virus. And a natural virus with all it's parts is going to elicit a more diverse collection of antibodies than a spike-protein targeted vaccine.
(not gp, not expressing support for this line of thinking)
That creating vaccines which require 6monthly-1yearly boosters that every must take creates a new, lucrative revenue stream for Big Phrama and a conflict of interest, even when the initial vaccines may be cheap (e.g. Immunity as a Service).
Are populations with large majorities of people who’ve received 2-3 injections seeing total or near eradication of coronavirus? I’m not aware of any examples.
Not really, it just looked to me like it filled the blank area of a standard dimension card. Are you surprised when index cards have lines to the bottom, and not just enough?
Though, I admit it had triggered a small, gamer part of me that wanted to get the completionist award for filling every slot.
That there's a massive conspiracy by Big Pharma to make colossal profits in the form of ~$30/vaccine, and that this is a waste of public money.
Instead, we as a society could save a lot of money by eating anti-parasitical drugs that don't work[1], or by getting sick, and potentially hospitalized for COVID. (Because even a brief a hospital stay won't trivially run into $XY(Z),000 billing. [2])
[1] And are, uh, also made by Big Pharma.
[2] Much of it also going to, of course, Big Pharma.
I think you are being very misleading here. Its not a conspiracy theory pharma company's care far more about profits than our health. In fact I would say there is a lot of strong evidence to support this. Google any pharma company name followed by settlement or fine. Pfizer has payed billions in fines for a variety of reason including bribing doctors and misleading regulators with fake data.
Its also worth noting Pfizer is making a killing. Google Pfizer profits 2021. They have something like 90% growth at the moment.
I would say Big Pharma 100% has an agenda to push. They want you to take their drugs so they make money (like any company). In this case its a vaccine. They don't care if you have had covid they want the money.
However in my opinion this is not some new behavior. This is exactly how they have always acted. Look at the opioid crisis.
I can totally see Big Pharma making up needless, recurring vaccines to cash in. They've done worse in the past.
I can even see the US government being paid off by Big Pharma to implement mandates solely to leech tax/insurance money off.
But every single developed country, many with government-funded healthcare where they have no interest in throwing away money on something that doesn't work, many a higher level of democracy and high government trust, not a single one of them questioning this and skipping it? That's where the conspiracy gets too big and hard to believe.
Why does it have to be a conspiracy, rather than the wheels of bureaucracy churning. The export of American culture is as strong as ever, and rather than considering evil intent, consider ignorance. An individual, faceless government unit, deemed "Department of Health", consisting of individuals who had the media spotlight on them for the past few months, power and prestige compared to before, can choose to fund certain studies.
Studies, many of which are absolutely useless, pounded out by the hundreds of thousand over the past 2 years in the name of moral good and saving lives.
Constant hypocrisy from certain protests being good for health, to football games not. From no links between lockdowns to case?death counts. Constant promotion of cloth masks, with lack of evidence, rather evidence against present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqkG4OZmV8o - towards the end you can see a player without a mask and a player with a mask, a player with a mask over his chin as well. The NBA is 95% vaccinated and players are exerting themselves greatly whenever on the court without a mask. Go back to the bench and put on a mask.
The two forms of immunity work differently. COVID infection may be mild or asymptomatic, but represents a threat of significant illness or death. The result of coronavirus infection generates immunity which works directly against a broad ranch of viral features and lasts 1.5 to 2 years. One of the factors involved with so called long COVID is infection causing an immune reaction to the body's own ACE receptors.
Viral immunity does have some risks, but they are fairly well understood, happen at extremely low frequency, and are most often exhibited within 15 minutes of administration which allows for precautions to be taken. The resulting immunity is specific to those parts of the virus targeted by the vaccine, but this generates very high titers which can be extremely effective in fighting infections.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that a large portion of the population has suppressed immunity and may not develop strong immunity from infection while also being at greater risk for negative outcomes. This is the population currently being urged to get vaccine boosters in order to reduce risks.
Projecting dislike for the drug industry onto this science can distort important judgements.
This article deserves an award for misleading by omission, as it sells "hybrid immunity" even after the CDC updated their website to make it clear that current Covid intramuscular vaccines only provide protection against serious illness, not the sterilizing immunity that happens after recovery from nasal infection.
The article is so impressive that it deserves a line-by-line analysis as a case study for future public relations and media literacy classes.
Your high school biology covered memory B cells and coronaviruses? It’s been a long time, but I’m confident mine didn’t.
Also the fact that virologists are making statements like “We’re flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure this stuff out” doesn’t lend credence to your assertion that this is all basic science.
> Your high school biology covered memory B cells...
I don't remember what my high school biology class covered, but I was interested in becoming a virologist in middle school. Memory B and T cells aren't esoteric knowledge. If you spent even an hour or two on the internet reading about how the immune system responds to viral infection, you'd almost certainly cover them.
It's curious to me that so much of the focus on COVID vaccines focuses on the antibodies produced immediately after infection and vaccination and so little on the longer-lasting immune responses (memory T and B cells).
> Those who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs harboured antibodies capable of defanging the mutant spike, which displays far more resistance to immune attack than any known naturally occurring variant. These peoples' antibodies even blocked other types of coronaviruses. “It’s very likely they will be effective against any future variant that SARS-CoV-2 throws against them,” says Hatziioannou.
> As the world watches out for new coronavirus variants, the basis of such ‘super-immunity’ has become one of the pandemic’s great mysteries. Researchers hope that, by mapping the differences between the immune protection that comes from infection compared with that from vaccination, they can chart a safer path to this higher level of protection.
> “It has implications on boosters and how our immune responses are primed for the next variant that emerges,” says Mehul Suthar, a virologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “We’re flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure this stuff out.”
I'm guessing (hoping?) the researchers are not as confused as the quotes make them out to be.
It is perfectly logical that the immune system would likely mount a broader response to natural infection. When you are vaccinated, you're being exposed to a (key) fragment of the spike protein. When you are infected with the virus, you're being exposed to a lot more. The full spike protein. The S2 subunit. The nucleocapsid protein. This gives the immune system a lot more to learn from and target.
Tangentially, it's also worth considering that our current vaccines are all delivered intramuscularly. It's a shame there isn't more investment in vaccines that could be delivered mucosally.
> ...systemic vaccination alone does not induce the whole variety of compartmentalized local immune responses observed after mucosal vaccination with the same antigen. As a respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 may require higher levels of mucosal immunity to truly slow or block transmission [2]. Indeed, the most direct pathway to sterilizing and population immunity may be especially boosted through mucosal vaccine delivery to promote anti-SARS-CoV-2 S-IgA and TRM cells at the nasopharyngeal site of virus entry and replication. Experimentally, a single intranasal dose of adenovirus-vectored vaccine protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection in the upper and lower respiratory tract in rhesus macaques [13]. Moreover, mucosal vaccines for establishing TRM cells could be particularly beneficial for pathogens that undergo rapid mutation, like SARS-CoV-2, and therefore evade antibody-mediated protection [14].
> It's curious to me that so much of the focus on COVID vaccines focuses on the antibodies produced immediately after infection and vaccination and so little on the longer-lasting immune responses (memory T and B cells).
Lol it really isn't curious. The vaccines do really well at the first metric, and it can be measured in very short trials (which means smaller trials due to less attrition, and means more trials, etc.) The second metric, they don't do so well at and it's more difficult to measure. It'd be curious if things were any other way.
That said, even if research involving longer-lasting immune responses is more difficult and costly, which limits how much of it we do compared to simple studies on antibodies, I still find it curious that so many experts seem to be expressing surprise at findings totally congruent with basic knowledge about immunity.
Good article, a litrevew of sorts focusing on long term immunity (B cell behavior) and multiple infection events. Dissapointingly, studying only infection + vaccine and vaccine + vaccine (+ booster) sequences. Looking forward further work to tackle vaccine + infection and infection + infection cases. A couple bits that caught my eye (i.e. reinforced my biases), though the whole article is well worth a read.
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> The team isolated hundreds of memory B cells — each making a unique antibody — from people at various time points after infection and vaccination. Natural infection triggered antibodies that continued to grow in potency and their breadth against variants for a year after infection, whereas most of those elicited by vaccination seemed to stop changing in the weeks after a second dose. Memory B cells that evolved after infection were also more likely than those from vaccination to make antibodies that block immune-evading variants such as Beta and Delta.
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> As breakthrough infections caused by the Delta variant stack up, researchers including Nussenzweig are keen to study the immunity in people who were infected after their COVID-19 vaccinations, rather than before. An individual’s first exposure to influenza virus biases their responses to subsequent exposures and vaccinations — a phenomenon called original antigenic sin — and researchers want to know if this occurs with SARS-CoV-2.
> Extending the interval between vaccine doses could also mimic aspects of hybrid immunity.
Essentially they see some evidence that the reason hybrid immunity works well also includes a time between exposure factor, and not just a “I got exposed again” part. It really is a shame that trials are so resource intensive that we couldn’t try more intervals/doses.
47 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadThe immunity conferred by getting COVID is quite variable from person to person, with some getting strong immunity and some getting little immunity depending on the particulars of their particular infection [1].
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/if-youve-already-h...
Flip the scenario, during the second wave in India, we were one of the few families in our neighborhood who were lucky that no family members caught COVID. All the local hospitals were filled, a large number of people we know survived but there were people who died around 4-5% of the people we knew who were infected and 40% who came very close to dying. The Delta variant arrived when a significant part of the elderly population had been vaccinated. You should recheck the your stats about the elderly, the second wave was brutal to under 40 folks as a good number of above 40 people had been vaccinated by the time the second wave hit.
Sure COVID might have a low fatality rate of 2-3% but 2-3% of a very huge population getting infected by a rapidly infectious disease is still a humungous number.
Or if you prefer Germany, where the most recently estimated fatality rate even for those 50 - 79 doesn't exceed 1%. It's much lower for those below this age range. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
Many other sources back up these findings across multiple countries.
Hacker News is really filling in the COVID misinformation niche since some other sites have started acting a little bit more responsibly.
Why is this surprising again? Two exposure events should elicit a stronger reaction than one, three stronger than two, etc.
Hell, it's even in the article:
"It’s not surprising that people infected and vaccinated are getting a nice response" -some doctor.
This should be absolutely unsurprising.
https://archive.is/ddcvB
One more sale for Big Pharma.
That creating vaccines which require 6monthly-1yearly boosters that every must take creates a new, lucrative revenue stream for Big Phrama and a conflict of interest, even when the initial vaccines may be cheap (e.g. Immunity as a Service).
Though, I admit it had triggered a small, gamer part of me that wanted to get the completionist award for filling every slot.
Instead, we as a society could save a lot of money by eating anti-parasitical drugs that don't work[1], or by getting sick, and potentially hospitalized for COVID. (Because even a brief a hospital stay won't trivially run into $XY(Z),000 billing. [2])
[1] And are, uh, also made by Big Pharma.
[2] Much of it also going to, of course, Big Pharma.
Its also worth noting Pfizer is making a killing. Google Pfizer profits 2021. They have something like 90% growth at the moment.
I would say Big Pharma 100% has an agenda to push. They want you to take their drugs so they make money (like any company). In this case its a vaccine. They don't care if you have had covid they want the money.
However in my opinion this is not some new behavior. This is exactly how they have always acted. Look at the opioid crisis.
I can even see the US government being paid off by Big Pharma to implement mandates solely to leech tax/insurance money off.
But every single developed country, many with government-funded healthcare where they have no interest in throwing away money on something that doesn't work, many a higher level of democracy and high government trust, not a single one of them questioning this and skipping it? That's where the conspiracy gets too big and hard to believe.
Studies, many of which are absolutely useless, pounded out by the hundreds of thousand over the past 2 years in the name of moral good and saving lives.
Constant hypocrisy from certain protests being good for health, to football games not. From no links between lockdowns to case?death counts. Constant promotion of cloth masks, with lack of evidence, rather evidence against present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqkG4OZmV8o - towards the end you can see a player without a mask and a player with a mask, a player with a mask over his chin as well. The NBA is 95% vaccinated and players are exerting themselves greatly whenever on the court without a mask. Go back to the bench and put on a mask.
The two forms of immunity work differently. COVID infection may be mild or asymptomatic, but represents a threat of significant illness or death. The result of coronavirus infection generates immunity which works directly against a broad ranch of viral features and lasts 1.5 to 2 years. One of the factors involved with so called long COVID is infection causing an immune reaction to the body's own ACE receptors.
Viral immunity does have some risks, but they are fairly well understood, happen at extremely low frequency, and are most often exhibited within 15 minutes of administration which allows for precautions to be taken. The resulting immunity is specific to those parts of the virus targeted by the vaccine, but this generates very high titers which can be extremely effective in fighting infections.
Furthermore, it is important to understand that a large portion of the population has suppressed immunity and may not develop strong immunity from infection while also being at greater risk for negative outcomes. This is the population currently being urged to get vaccine boosters in order to reduce risks.
Projecting dislike for the drug industry onto this science can distort important judgements.
The article is so impressive that it deserves a line-by-line analysis as a case study for future public relations and media literacy classes.
Also the fact that virologists are making statements like “We’re flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure this stuff out” doesn’t lend credence to your assertion that this is all basic science.
I don't remember what my high school biology class covered, but I was interested in becoming a virologist in middle school. Memory B and T cells aren't esoteric knowledge. If you spent even an hour or two on the internet reading about how the immune system responds to viral infection, you'd almost certainly cover them.
It's curious to me that so much of the focus on COVID vaccines focuses on the antibodies produced immediately after infection and vaccination and so little on the longer-lasting immune responses (memory T and B cells).
> Those who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs harboured antibodies capable of defanging the mutant spike, which displays far more resistance to immune attack than any known naturally occurring variant. These peoples' antibodies even blocked other types of coronaviruses. “It’s very likely they will be effective against any future variant that SARS-CoV-2 throws against them,” says Hatziioannou.
> As the world watches out for new coronavirus variants, the basis of such ‘super-immunity’ has become one of the pandemic’s great mysteries. Researchers hope that, by mapping the differences between the immune protection that comes from infection compared with that from vaccination, they can chart a safer path to this higher level of protection.
> “It has implications on boosters and how our immune responses are primed for the next variant that emerges,” says Mehul Suthar, a virologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “We’re flying by the seat of our pants trying to figure this stuff out.”
I'm guessing (hoping?) the researchers are not as confused as the quotes make them out to be.
It is perfectly logical that the immune system would likely mount a broader response to natural infection. When you are vaccinated, you're being exposed to a (key) fragment of the spike protein. When you are infected with the virus, you're being exposed to a lot more. The full spike protein. The S2 subunit. The nucleocapsid protein. This gives the immune system a lot more to learn from and target.
Tangentially, it's also worth considering that our current vaccines are all delivered intramuscularly. It's a shame there isn't more investment in vaccines that could be delivered mucosally.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8358136/
> ...systemic vaccination alone does not induce the whole variety of compartmentalized local immune responses observed after mucosal vaccination with the same antigen. As a respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 may require higher levels of mucosal immunity to truly slow or block transmission [2]. Indeed, the most direct pathway to sterilizing and population immunity may be especially boosted through mucosal vaccine delivery to promote anti-SARS-CoV-2 S-IgA and TRM cells at the nasopharyngeal site of virus entry and replication. Experimentally, a single intranasal dose of adenovirus-vectored vaccine protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection in the upper and lower respiratory tract in rhesus macaques [13]. Moreover, mucosal vaccines for establishing TRM cells could be particularly beneficial for pathogens that undergo rapid mutation, like SARS-CoV-2, and therefore evade antibody-mediated protection [14].
Lol it really isn't curious. The vaccines do really well at the first metric, and it can be measured in very short trials (which means smaller trials due to less attrition, and means more trials, etc.) The second metric, they don't do so well at and it's more difficult to measure. It'd be curious if things were any other way.
That said, even if research involving longer-lasting immune responses is more difficult and costly, which limits how much of it we do compared to simple studies on antibodies, I still find it curious that so many experts seem to be expressing surprise at findings totally congruent with basic knowledge about immunity.
-----
> The team isolated hundreds of memory B cells — each making a unique antibody — from people at various time points after infection and vaccination. Natural infection triggered antibodies that continued to grow in potency and their breadth against variants for a year after infection, whereas most of those elicited by vaccination seemed to stop changing in the weeks after a second dose. Memory B cells that evolved after infection were also more likely than those from vaccination to make antibodies that block immune-evading variants such as Beta and Delta.
-----
> As breakthrough infections caused by the Delta variant stack up, researchers including Nussenzweig are keen to study the immunity in people who were infected after their COVID-19 vaccinations, rather than before. An individual’s first exposure to influenza virus biases their responses to subsequent exposures and vaccinations — a phenomenon called original antigenic sin — and researchers want to know if this occurs with SARS-CoV-2.
> Extending the interval between vaccine doses could also mimic aspects of hybrid immunity.
Essentially they see some evidence that the reason hybrid immunity works well also includes a time between exposure factor, and not just a “I got exposed again” part. It really is a shame that trials are so resource intensive that we couldn’t try more intervals/doses.