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Comment by castratikron | Hacker News Reader

Not unusual, look at tetanus. The tetanus toxin is so potent that the amount that can kill you isn't enough to generate an immune response, so even if you manage to survive there's no guarantee you won't get it again as you'll have no protection. The vaccine on the other hand generates a much stronger response than the real disease.

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Note that the tetanus vaccine actually targets the toxin itself, not the bacteria that produces the toxin: https://www.who.int/biologicals/vaccines/tetanus/en/

Anyway, it's a myth that you can't develop antibodies to tetanus/tetanus toxin naturally. Lots of studies have found otherwise, finding tetanus antibodies in both humans and animals that haven't been vaccinated: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1092755/

It's just not a very relevant fact, as tetanus is deadly, and the tetanus vaccine is cheap and works well. In fact, there's evidence the vaccine works even better than we thought, and booster shots may not be needed: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/2/285/5741633

Except that the COVID19 vaccines don't work at all in the same way at the tetanus vaccines.

Uh... yes it does? Both present an single inactive/non-dangerous molecule to the body against which it can develop an immune response using its own toolkit. Tetanus toxoid is synthesized externally where the covid spike protein is done by the body via introduced mRNA, but the immune system is doing the same job.

So they're the same if you overlook the tiny detail of where the antigen is manufactured, either via a totally novel method in the body via instructions encoded in mRNA versus synthetically in a lab somewhere.

Yeah totally exactly the same 9.9

Sigh. The question was about why it should or shouldn't be surprising that a vaccine generates a stronger immune response than a real infection. And tetanus was cited as an example. And it was dismissed as being unrelated. And that was WRONG, because the immune mechanism is basically the same and the only difference is where the antigen comes from.

To wit: tetanus and covid vaccines both generate stronger immune responses than the virus they are designed to fight, and for very similar reasons. Do you actually disagree with that statement?

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