I’m not sure which bit the “‘getting infected’ thing” is referring to now, but I was talking about the convalescent patients mentioned in the study. I don’t know about continuous low-level exposure (i.e., inhaling concentrations of virus particles sufficient to provoke some mild immune response but not sufficient to cause illness) - I assume that people have been doing that around the world for two years now and that it would have an effect on gradually increasing background immunity.
But I think a lot of those antibody cross-reactivity studies use blood samples prior to 2019 to rule that out.
Yes, I read your other replies. I was just suggesting that, in the grand scheme of things, convalescent immunity is perhaps not the driving factor in developing “herd immunity”, and that far too much attention is paid to it in the research. After two years of this, very few people have even been logged as “cases”, and of those a fair fraction will have had no important symptoms. It seems to me that most people are just … immune, at least to the extent that they’re not going to die.
Add to that whatever protection is gained by the vaccines for the old codgers, and I’d say all is well. Apart from the impending spectre of fascism and the mother of all recessions, of course.
All in all, I haven’t seen ‘the science,’ or any ongoing Covid-19 data that supports the requirement to mandatorily vaccinate the entire world multiple times over - every man, woman and child, etc., for life - whilst there is plenty of scientific evidence and studies (with more being produced every week) that indicates it is really quite unnecessary and unscientific to do so.
People are more likely to have a stroke from their own irrational anxiety over Covid-19, than from the actual virus itself.
Incidentally, you seem to be discounting the fact that almost everyone had a reasonable level of immunity to COVID way-back-when. It was not particularly “novel” as far as our immune systems were concerned, and two years of exposure means that everyone is now well and truly immune. Despite overt manipulation of death statistics, so it’s hard to tell with any certainty, it appears that almost nobody is actually “dying of COVID” these days. The numbers are down in the noise, comparable to death-by-doctor, suicide, or drug overdose.
It doesn’t matter. We have safe and effective vaccines that help more people survive the virus more than socalled natural immunity.
It boosts our immunity on top of our immunity. The fact that your post insinuates that people who have died do not matter because we need to use our natural immunity is sick and appalling.
Those people matter too. Regardless of the number.
Secondly, these numbers are with the interventions. So your point is moot. You can’t change the past and rerun the test.
It matters greatly. If the answer is “only 1 in 3 people survive” then we have a genuine pandemic on our hands, and almost any intervention is justified, including mandatory vaccines.
If the answer is “998 in 1000” - which is in the right ballpark - then almost nothing is justified.
If the answer is “9998 in 10000” - which is true for those under 60 - then lockdowns, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and all the rest of it start to look a lot like fascism.
And why do you need to boost the immunity of someone who already has immunity? You might also have missed the bit where young people who are double-vaxed appear to be getting omicron at a higher rate than the unvaxed.
That isn’t what I said. Asserting that “it doesn’t matter [how many people survive]” is equivalent to saying that we can do anything we like to these perfectly healthy people here, if there is some purported benefit for this tiny minority of sick/old people over there. We don’t make that sort of judgement about, say, the flu, which kills 1 in 1000 people (mostly old/sick people) every single year. So why start now?
You’re assuming that the outcome of these ‘interventions’ is single-tailed. A lot of research has been done on this, and there is no apparent correlation between interventions and positive outcomes. This is hardly surprising, since it’s difficult to even see any excess deaths in most countries. In the UK, for example, the ASMR is comparable to 2009; for various reasons, the last few years has been a period of unusually-low death rates, and a certain fraction of the 2020/21 uptick has been due to an almost complete shutdown of the health services.
As for the downsides, we haven’t seen the half of it. I think you know a bit about economics, and perhaps you realise that the shit is going to hit the fan real soon now, thanks to ‘interventions’.
From the same article cited above from the Times of Israel:
"The vaccine-dependent people had a seven-fold higher chance of symptomatic infection, and a 6.7-fold higher chance of being hospitalized.
In addition, a sample of 16,215 who were infected during Israel’s third wave in January-February 2021 was compared to an equal number of people vaccinated during that period. The contrast for these two groups was even starker: It showed that Delta had a 27-fold higher chance of breaking through vaccine protection from January and February and causing symptoms than breaking through natural immunity acquired in the same period and causing symptoms."
And also the next paragraph from the same article describing the apparently positive effects of vaccination in convalescent patients, in case you missed it:
The study also found that when recovered patients boosted their natural protection with a single vaccine shot — as recommended by Israeli health officials — their protection reached new highs, and they had approximately half the infection risk of other recovered patients.
“Individuals who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant,” the study suggested.
The reason I highlighted those particular sections was to emphasise the importance of natural immunity. It’s a very significant report.
And again, on that study:
“It’s a textbook example of how natural immunity is really better than vaccination,” says Charlotte Thålin, a physician and immunology researcher at Danderyd Hospital and the Karolinska Institute who studies the immune responses to SARS-CoV-2.
“To my knowledge, it’s the first time [this] has really been shown in the context of COVID-19."
There’s also a huge amount of pressure on the doctors in Israel to fully support the vaccine-only approach to Covid, so we should always expect such articles, even though showing natural immunity is working very well, to be tempered with messages such as the one you referenced.
Another example, Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University has published data showing people who recover from a SARS-CoV-2 infection continue to develop increasing numbers and types of coronavirus-targeting antibodies for up to 1 year. By contrast, he says, twice-vaccinated people stop seeing increases “in the potency or breadth of the overall memory antibody compartment” a few months after their second dose.
Apropos of nothing … I just came across this chart for the UK that puts 2020’s apocalyptic death rate - with corpses spilling out of hospitals etc etc - into a bit of historical context. And yes, it is accurate (to the extent that any such complex assessment of large populations is “accurate”). As far as I can tell, the bars correspond with official ONS statistics at least for the last 30 years.
So, they go to a hospital with a broken arm, or in need of stitches for typical childhood injuries, or whatever, get tested as a form of protocol, and whoa, they have COVID and are not dying nor even maybe complaining of any COVID-type symptom, yet are listed as COVID hospitalizations.
