Any other result would have been surprising. Why is this interesting, beyond just confirming what we were already 99.99% certain we knew?
-- biochemist
-- biochemist
Regardless, this study is good news — because it means that every person who is infected and then recovers contributes towards herd immunity, regardless of their outlook on vaccines.
Is it actually the case that immunocompromised people cannot be vaccinated? The ones that I know have been; as far as I know, the mRNA vaccines by virtue of not being based on live virus are not dangerous to those with weakened immune systems.
In recent studies something like half of organ transplant recipients did not produce antibodies after being vaccinated, and there have been a few cases where a group of vaccinated transplant recipients caught Covid (e.g. from a vaccinated nurse who had an asymptomatic infection) and had severe symptoms including some deaths.
We both got vaccinated as soon as we could.
If so you should probably email these researchers or something. Bet they would be interested
This year I've been heavily sick several times (and the flu almost never caused me all this pain before in my life) and it was never covid.
If one of the test returned a false positive I would have been convinced it was covid. If I actually got covid again I would have believed I was one of the rare reinfections.
It's not like bringing your bomb onto a plane decreases the odds of an attack, because what are the odds of two bombs.
The devil is in the details here. If natural immunity wears off after 6-9 months (as some studies suggest), and one spouse got infected again after that period, then the odds of the other one of getting re-infected too are pretty high.
Well, I'm currently in quarantine from my 4 month old and wife because an acquaintance refused to get vaccinated. "young people don't die from COVID" type mentality.
I attended my brother's bachelor party - of which we all thought everyone was vaccinated. Turns out this person, not only refused to get vaccinated - but had COVID exposure and still decided to attend. He told us the day after being in close contact for 3 days, that he tested positive and had symptoms during our contact with him.
Of the unvaccinated people I know, this mentality is the large majority of them. They refuse to get vaccinated because they refuse to consider how their actions might actually impact someone else.
Also, presumably, this person would now be as immune as someone who's gotten the vaccine, based on this study.
What mentality is this? It is well known that young people are at extremely low risk of dying, even more so than the average person.
> He told us the day after being in close contact for 3 days, that he tested positive and had symptoms during our contact with him.
The problem wasn't that your acquaintance refused the vaccine. The problem is that he didn't stay home. You could say the same thing about the flu. If you have it, don't go to parties. Who goes to a party with a flu? A cold even?
I hardly think this guy is representative. There's also evidence that asymptomatic people don't spread COVID. This would mean that if they don't have symptoms, you won't get it, and if they do and they're like most people, they'll stay home which means no transmission.
> Of the unvaccinated [sic] people I know, this mentality is the large majority of them. They refuse to get vaccinated because they refuse to consider how their actions might actually impact someone else.
This seems unnecessarily hostile. Plenty of people don't want to be vaccinated either because they've had COVID and don't need it (this study isn't the first; Peter McCullough for example has spoken about other studies), they don't want to risk the potential side effects, including long term, of an experimental vaccine that is not technically approved by the FDA, ethical/religious reasons (the use of stem cell lines derived from aborted children during vaccine research, etc), and because the virus is not a serious threat to most people.
It is disturbing how the media is lumping those wary of the COVID vaccine in with antivaxers (~2% of the population; 98% of Americans get all common immunizations), COVID deniers, or "grandma killers". Let's not do that, as the OP recommends.
We wouldn’t be in the middle of a pandemic if this were true.
> This would mean that if they don't have symptoms, you won't get it
It's flu-like transmission - which is mostly through droplets. If you're not sneezing in the face of people you don't have high chances of passing it around
"When taken together, I think these two studies show that people with asymptomatic covid-19 can and do spread the disease, and the best estimate from both studies is that those with symptomatic disease are about three to four times more infectious than those with asymptomatic disease. That is not a huge difference. Even though people with symptoms are a couple of times more infectious than people without symptoms, those without symptoms could still be causing more infections overall."
[0] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/06/06/can-asymptomatic-p...
They've considered it, they just don't care. What they actually care more about is the insinuation that they should care at all.
To not trust vaccination is to not trust science.
However, that's across the population. Factors like extended contact period increase viral load intake, could further decrease the effectiveness. Since my 4 month old can't get vaccinated against COVID yet, we decided it wasn't worth taking the risk.
Most vaccines have an efficacy lower than the COVID vaccines. Basically you are feeding off of your own fear, and you don't trust science. That's your right, but don't blame anyone for your self-imposed quarantine but yourself at this point.
OK, I think I can agree with this, I've seen lots of "getting the vaccine provides much better immunity than getting Covid"-type statements that seemed more like conjecture.
> The more widely this spreads, the more people will realize it's ok to rely on natural immunity, and to not blanket demonize those who are unvaccinated.
Is this a serious statement? The problem isn't that natural immunity doesn't keep make you immune, the problem is that "acquiring natural immunity" often results in death, especially for vulnerable populations.
> Is this a serious statement? The problem isn't that natural immunity doesn't keep make you immune, the problem is that "acquiring natural immunity" often results in death, especially for vulnerable populations.
It's a real policy question: how much to worry about vaccinating people who already had COVID. The confusion (or propaganda?) downplaying natural immunity means that many people would needlessly get the vaccine while already possessing immunity from prior infection.
In the US, this no longer matters, as we already have more vaccine supply than we have people willing to receive it. Elsewhere, though, where supplies remain scarce, we absolutely should be focusing efforts around vaccinating people who have not yet gotten the disease.
You're reading beyond what I'm saying. My point is that there is no need to push those who have already gotten Covid to also get the vaccine. I'm not saying anything about getting sick as an alternative to getting the vaccine.
It would be a shame if such people avoided the vaccine under a disinformation-driven impression that the vaccines are risky, and ended up catching/spreading Covid later on.
Owing to the dramatic risk asymmetry between vaccine and disease, it's probably better to implement a policy that optimizes more for expediency, simplicity (fewer rules and fewer exceptions) and, in this case, minimizing the number of false assumptions made about the status of individuals. ie.: in the context of vaccination it's sometimes better to not assume that everyone who claims to have been previously infected was actually infected, even if we have lab data to back up this assumption.
I'm not saying current policies all make perfect sense or anything, but it doesn't particularly surprise me that everyone is being accounted for in the same way WRT the vaccine.
Still, I don't see how public health would benefit from not recommending shots to everyone as there is no downside.
You'd get all the never infected people vaccinated sooner; so 'everyone' (except anti-vax not infected prior to effective 'herd immunity') would be immune sooner.
In practice, don't underestimate how much more inefficient or troublesome a seemingly simple additional rule or exception might be to administer... :P
And while trying to predict second-order behavior effects is tricky either way it is pretty clear that saying "don't get the vaccine if you already had Covid" would scare some people away.
I had quite the opposite experience ; plenty of people told me they had (mild) flu symptoms - a lot of TMI, to be honest - and assumed they had had COVID already. It later turned out, with no exception, that they absolutely did not.
Scaring those people away would probably hurt a lot, at least in my anecdotal experience.
Do you mean tested for antibodies with finger prick blood test, or PCR random number generator (see elon musk wild PCR results).
I was sick, had test that showed antibodies, and a confirmation letter from my Dr.
Since the EUA to rush out the vaccines does not include those who had it and recovered, it needs more testing and study before it is approved for those who have antibodies. The jab is not risk-free.
I was in a similar position as you: possible early COVID exposure (though no symptoms), several positive antibody tests, but absolutely zero side effects from either Pfizer shot. Annoyed not a few people though by my lack of any reaction to the shots, so that was kinda fun.
The VAERS data suggests there are numerous groups at very low risk from Covid for which this may not be the case.
VAERS data needs to be interpreted with special care. It's not equivalent to a safety study with a proper experimental design. It has a whole lot of legal and administrative context to account for.
Dying or having an adverse event after vaccination also isn't the same as dying from vaccination; even the genuine VAERS reports don't permit teasing this wrinkle out on their own.
And you'd be committing a felony. I see this idea tossed around all the time that tons of the reports coming in are fake, but so far have seen scant evidence that that's the case.
> Dying or having an adverse event after vaccination also isn't the same as dying from vaccination; even the genuine VAERS reports don't permit teasing this wrinkle out on their own.
Okay, but then why are so many more people reporting dying after Covid-19 vaccination than have reported dying after flu shots which have been administered to millions of people for decades?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/may/11/bill-zedle...
> In a July 2005 web post, Dr. James R. Laidler wrote: "The chief problem with the VAERS data is that reports can be entered by anyone and are not routinely verified. To demonstrate this, a few years ago I entered a report that an influenza vaccine had turned me into The Hulk. The report was accepted and entered into the database.
> "Because the reported adverse event was so… unusual," Laidler wrote, "a representative of VAERS contacted me. After a discussion of the VAERS database and its limitations, they asked for my permission to delete the record, which I granted. If I had not agreed, the record would be there still, showing that any claim can become part of the database, no matter how outrageous or improbable."
As for your question about the numbers:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/may/03/vaers-governm...
> Moss explained one way VAERS can amplify fears about the COVID-19 vaccine in particular. Most vaccinations are given to a small segment of the population: young, healthy children, who are generally less likely to have health problems afterward. But the COVID-19 vaccine is given to a much larger group — all Americans 16 and older are eligible now. And the earliest recipients included a large number of elderly patients and adults with preexisting health problems.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaers/fact-chec...
> “To date, VAERS has not detected patterns in cause of death that would indicate a safety problem with COVID-19 vaccines.”
> Moss explained one way VAERS can amplify fears about the COVID-19 vaccine in particular. Most vaccinations are given to a small segment of the population: young, healthy children, who are generally less likely to have health problems afterward. But the COVID-19 vaccine is given to a much larger group — all Americans 16 and older are eligible now. And the earliest recipients included a large number of elderly patients and adults with preexisting health problems.
This is trivially accounted for by comparing Covid and influenza vaccines. If I limit to ages 18-59 I get ~73,000 total adverse events for influenza vaccines across their entire history, and 173,000 adverse events for Covid vaccines since they started to be administered at the beginning of the year.
- The vast majority of new drugs that undergo safety trials are found to have serious side effects.
- The near totality of new vaccines that undergo safety trials are found to have a formidably beneficial risk profile.
Don't make the mistake of applying the same risk heuristic in your mind for both things. Risk assessments in science have absolutely nothing to do with politics.
[1] https://www.kfyrtv.com/2021/03/15/health-experts-say-those-p...
This study appears to be based on following up with a single hospital's own database of people who tested positive. But I imagine you would get different results if you just found a bunch of people and asked them to self-report their prior infection status before enrolling them in the study.
Agree on the self-reporting, but I guess my larger point is he already doesn't want to get the vax and people telling him that his natural immunity is not sufficient makes him even more distrustful since he does know enough about science/statistics to see that natural immunity is about equal with a vaccine as far as we can tell.
The vaccines are important in establishing herd immunity, but I don’t understand the desire to jab people who already have established immunity.
You don’t need to convince me to get vaccinated, but this is a profoundly unscientific statement. The mRNA vaccines are a brand new technology that would not have been approved without several years of human trials if there was not a pandemic justifying rushing through the normal process.
So far so good, but the immune system is a complex system and we can’t rule out some unexpected side effects for some people some of the time.
I'm not a "anti-vaxxer" "conspiracy theorist" "racist" "sexist" "nazi" but the risk is just too low for me to care. If you think covid can affect you, take the vaccine and don't bother me. I self isolated weeks before the government told me so because we didn't know what the risk involved was. By the time the government approved a 2 weeks lockdown which turned into 1 year and a half, it was already evident the risks were minimal. This is all a political play and I shudder when I think about what's coming next. Shall we do a climate change lockdown next? Or shall we try some more covid variants first?
I also don't think vaccines are likely to be dangerous (minus the platelets / blood clots issue - hopefully no long term issues pop up in 10 years).
Also, the downside is that everyone is paying for these shots, they're not free and they come out of the taxes the government steals from me every month - and they accomplish very little. Same as the flu shots.
Just get it in everyone's arms as fast as possible, all this dicking around with rules around who can or should get it now that it's plentiful is just slowing everything down.
[1] to the point that 'we' should be doing a lot more to get our excess to countries that are still struggling.
Anecdotal data: my wife and I got COVID twice 9 months apart last year. The second time my wife ended up in the hospital.
Attempting to discuss it here will still commonly get you downvoted. HN is not a particularly rational forum. People make the mistake of thinking it is because a lot of engineers hang out here. Engineers are not especially rational, that's a common myth derived from failing to understand the way people mentally compartmentalize; how they can frequently be rational about one subject and irrational about another.
Try this one for example: the numbers they've been reporting about Covid infections the past year are not the actual infection numbers, not even remotely close. Yet they're held up everywhere as being representative of how many infections there have been.
This is still the biggest comedy going about the pandemic. It's hilarious how batshit crazy people can be.
If the US were a sane nation, the people that have been trying to represent the supposedly official infection count as being fully representative of the number of infections that have occurred - those people would be publicly mocked and shamed for being anti-science, the equivalent of flat-earthers. Instead, the flat-earthers dominate the media and national discussion. That's why the lab-leak theory was buried under so much censorship and for so long, those same people have been holding that conversation back very aggressively.
Most people know on some level that the held-up official infection tally is not representative of the real number of infections. And yet the mainstream media, without exception, pretends those are the legitimate infection numbers. Any attempt to discuss how many infections have really occurred, will be shouted down. The shrieking emotionalism that pours out when you open this can of worms, is endlessly fascinating to me.
If you say: how many people in the US have had Covid, they'll point at the magic official number, which is not correct.
If we wanted to have a serious discussion nationally about herd immunity (for example), one of the most important steps is one they intentionally refuse to take: let's try to get a more serious estimate on how many people nationally have actually had Covid.
They won't have that conversation and the media goes out of its way to avoid it (and has done so for a year now). Why? Pick your poison on the why answer. Political psychopaths lusting for control, looking to prolong their ability to take advantage of a disaster (the 'ol never waste a good crisis mentality). Wildly irrational anti-science types in power that pretend they represent science, which is the wing that Fauci belongs to. Maybe a combination. Maybe it's just the fear that if the masses of people think we're anywhere near herd immunity, the vaccination rates will plunge even faster, so some people want to maintain the false illusion (on the actual infection counts) as long as possible.
No scientist ever believes any measurement to be perfectly accurate, and different types of random error, systematic errors, and statistical biases always need to be accounted for.
And they are.
I think most on HN would agree with your assessment that the real number of cases are somewhat higher than the official count, although I haven’t seen any evidence indicating exactly how much higher or lower. The Dakota states did seem to taper off cases immensely before the vaccines were distributed, indicating a possible early herd immunity.
That's so unlikely it's laughable, but it's widely reported and accepted.
PS.: my 99.99% refers to the state of human knowledge and is more about what experts in the field know than what the general public knows.
Doesn't really seem that mind boggling to me. The clear public health impetus at this point is simply to get shots in as many arms as possible. We've already had Fauci openly admit that he gave guidance against masking and low-balled herd immunity threshold estimates because he presumed it would not lead to the behavior he desired from the public at the time. It's not hard to imagine that mentality has made its way into the rank-and-file somewhat.
Does that really boggle your mind? We're all human. I don't think there's a relationship between being an expert and being honest.
Just a reminder that these are actually good heuristics to live by, in life in general:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_the_assumptio...