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Comment by iridium_core | Hacker News Reader

Should I get vaccinated if I have already been infected with COVID?

Yes. "COVID-19 vaccination should be offered to you regardless of whether you already had COVID-19 infection." https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html

Why is a correctly summarized answer, from a link to the CDC that directly states and answers the grandparents question, with source, being downvoted so heavily? Is there something I’m missing?

Edit: And this honest question asking why is too?

Maybe because this forum, as any other forum with significant impact, is influenced by third parties with commerical or political agendas through "bots" or cheap click workers.

I think that depends on your risk factors and where you are « in line ». IMNADB, talk to your doctor

1) Yes, even if you're sure

2) The running theory is that an immunological response is primed by a first infection, so you'll probably benefit little

As this is the internet, medical questions are answered anecdotally by randoms, like me: I got COVID back in March. I'd say I got medium sick. Worst few days of my life. In the last 9 months I have been in close contact with people who have later also gotten ill, but I have not had any effects myself. So either I'm spreading it or I am immune (or both?). So there you go.

The best advice for answering medical questions on the internet is: ask your doctor. But generally, yeah why not

Which often is terrible advice that mostly serves to limit liability. Most medical doctors will not have a good, evidence-based answer to such questions.

Better reply: Search the internet for authoritative sources (e.g., official guidance of governmental institutions) or medical guidelines.

The current recommendation is yes, you should get vaccinated.

(If we continue at the incredibly slow pace of vaccinations we're going, though, I wouldn't be surprised if experts start recommending people who have had Covid get lower priority. An expert recently shared that, at this rate, it will take ten years to get to herd immunity in the US. [1])

1. https://twitter.com/DrLeanaWen/status/1343920976854196225

Well hopefully they approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine too, which should be much easier to roll out are greater scale.

The problems so far are not related to the particular vaccines, but rather the lack of planning and money for said management. 10m doses have been distributed but only 2m given so far. States are really struggling due to lack of federal assistance in $$ and planning.

It's hard to know how much of the lag is A) holidays, B) reporting delays, C) logistics delays (allocation to the state isn't delivery to the point of care), vs D) ramping/administration delays.

I suspect many more doses have been given but not reported (B), and a lot more of the shortfall can be explained by A & C.

If that's true, we're going to be production limited very soon... though the decision to hold back more than half of the doses doesn't help.

Reaching phase 1B will help, too, because it will mean the opening of mass vaccination clinics, which can run in parallel to the remaining portion of 1A which is more targeted and logistically complicated. E.g. Santa Clara County Fairgrounds are set up for high throughput drive-through COVID testing and plans are to use the same infrastructure that can host massive numbers of cars and lanes to have massive numbers vaccinated and waiting out their 20 minute observation time. This site will be able to do thousands of doses per day-- >0.3% of the County's population per day-- alone, which exceeds the number of doses we can be expected to be allocated for quite some time.

Johnson and Johnson is the best hope for another near-term EUA, which could significantly improve vaccine supply in February.

The vaccine matters, as they have different storage requirements and dosing requirements. One of the vaccines requires that it be kept in a deep freeze, thawed before use, and everyone needs two doses. This is a logistically complicated process that takes much more time to deliver, and will therefore be slower.

The Oxford vaccine can be stored in a regular refrigerator, which drastically reduces infrastructure cost and makes it speedier to administer, since it doesn’t need to be carefully warmed to room temperature from subzero.

Oh, and it’s cheaper. That matters.

Wider availability means you can not worry about prioritization.

There's no guarantee things would be going any faster, but if anyone can walk into a pharmacy and get a shot it seems like it would speed up a bit.

I'm probably going to be downvoted for this...pointing out any issues in any measures towards covid seems to have this effect.

But how is astrazeneca's methodology reasonable?

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020...

>Over 23,000 participants are being assessed following two doses of either a half-dose/full-dose regimen or a regimen of two full doses of AZD1222 or a comparator, meningococcal conjugate vaccine called MenACWY.

The placebo in the study was a meningitis vaccine that actually caused issues that halted the study and because astrazeneca's vaccine was deemed more effective than that, the vaccine was deemed a success.

In what way is that anywhere near a reasonable clinical study?

Their process was not reasonable. Which is why it was considered a failure and I believe they had to go back to the drawing board.

They will have to do a proper job, if they haven't already. With the other two vaccines already approved, national health boards will be in no rush to fast track it.

Not sure where you're getting your data, but it's incorrect.

It was not considered a failure. There have been some questions about what the best dosage and timing might be for the highest effectiveness, but I've heard the UK may approve it as early as tomorrow.

The USA may wait until the trial being run inside the USA is completed, but that has more to do with ensuring the vaccine is safe and works on their wide demographics than any concerns with how the UK and Brazil studies were done.

>the UK may approve it as early as tomorrow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549454

Update: They did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25579391

Having a placebo which has some degree of side effects is not insane, even though it caused problems here.

The vaccines have lots of side effects. If you give something with lots of side effects and compare it to a placebo with none, people have a good guess of what group they're in and behave differently. This is often considered more reasonable than comparing to a saline injection, and it's a reason why lots of drugs now are compared to e.g. ritalin-- something relatively benign with some side effect that feels like it is "doing something".

The half-dose/full-dose regimen was a mistake in a clinic administering the trial, though. A mistake that happened to look more effective than the overall vaccine population, which is a bit troublesome and a primary reason why AstraZeneca has problems now.

Now that we have effective COVID vaccines, we can run noninferiority trials-- e.g. comparing Moderna's vaccine to a potential new vaccine-- which get around a lot of the problems here.

> The half-dose/full-dose regimen was a mistake in a clinic administering the trial, though.

More on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25548342

The placebo has to be something that feels like a vaccine, otherwise the double-blind aspect will be broken. But since we know the precise risks associated with meningitis vaccines, we can trivially determine the relative risk of the covid vaccine compared to something else of a known risk level.

Oh, and it's not like the meningitis vaccine will confer any protection from covid.

I would be very surprised if the vaccination rate didn’t increase at least 10x from what it is now. This actually seems like pretty positive news

There are diseases that you can recover from without developing an immunity; tetanus is an example. The vaccine generates a much greater immune response than the actual disease.

Recent studies seem to indicate that tetanus vaccines are actually effective for at least 30 years. The UK and other countries don't recommend any booster shots for tetanus. Makes you wonder why we do in the US.

https://watermark.silverchair.com/ciw066.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...

I wouldn't. 2 recent studies from Austria conclude that an infection grants you a superior (to vaccination) stable long-term immunity effect.

https://tkp.at/2020/12/12/meduni-innsbruck-immunitaet-durch-... (German)

In my opinion, you should not do that while the vaccine is in short supply.

You very likely have good enough immunity to wait. Let someone unprotected get the shot.

Answer is yes but you are much lower priority than others, bottom of the priority stack. CDC made a huge mistake not clarifying this, and this mistake will make it take significantly longer for us to hit herd immunity.

There is very little chance you can catch it again if you already,and if you did it is likely to not be severe. But the immunity conferred by vaccines is often stronger and longer lasting from vaccines than from the disease itself. It's likely the case here based on preliminary numbers, but still not fully prove.

No. The answer isn't "yes". And you have linked to absolutely no studies to affirm whether this brand new vaccine is more effective than natural antibodies long-term. No such studies have been conducted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-natural-immu...

Unless you've got an academic study with a clinical trial of two sets of populations one with natural antibodies, one with vaccination, and perhaps a third without it, you don't know and NYT doesn't know. The vaccine was rushed, showed maybe a 90% efficacy. There's not evidence of widespread Covid relapses after natural immunity is achieved. There's also literally no long term data on this vaccine, because it's brand new.

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