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Comment by Panther34543 | Hacker News Reader

Ugg, why doesn't anybody, whether it be government officials, employers, whatever, ever consider those with natural immunity?

It's like some weird joke. The official CDC estimates over 115 MILLION natural infections in the U.S. alone, and that only accounts for February 2020-March 2021. It doesn't account for all the infections before February 2020 (I and most of my coworkers in downtown SF got it in January) nor any of the infections of the last 4 months, so that number should probably be at 130-140 million or more.

Yet, for some unknown reason, natural infection is NEVER talked about anywhere. Why? There's an absolute ton of natural immunity that isn't being talked about or considered and it's very, very, strange. Many people have no intention of taking the vaccine because they prefer natural immunity.

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Natural immunity is not as well understood as vaccine response and longevity for COVID-19. There's also increasing evidence that newer variants like Delta present a significant reinfection risk for those who were infected with the wildtype or even Alpha six or more months before.

Delta also presents a risk of breakthrough infection for vaccinated people.

And that seems likely to lead to the development of new strains against which the current vaccines are ineffective, as the virus mutates in vaccinated people.

I'm vaccinated myself, but I don't count on that providing protection for long. I expect it to be more like the flu, for which yearly vaccines are required against whatever strains are expected to be common that year.

Breakthrough infections with Delta remain relatively low amongst fully vaccinated people, with most cases not resulting in serious infections.

But isn't it true that most cases don't result in serious infections, regardless of vaccination status? I recall reading at one point that 80% of infections are asymptomatic or very mild.

However there are many more studies of variations for vaccinated people than for natural immunity. It may be because the laboratories themselves are interested commercially for those studies, while natural immunity doesn't bring them any commercial benefit, but this doesn't change from the information we have right now.

So TL;DR, it is just better to be vaccinated right now.

That TL;DR doesn't follow from the main paragraph, which simply says we don't know if it's better to be vaccinated.

Yeah, sorry, what I meant was that in conclusion it was better to be vaccinated considering the studies we have (not a TL;DR).

But there's also evidence it presents a significant risk for people who were vaccinated against the earlier variants too.

Agreed, it may well make sense to have people get boosters at some point.

You have to prove natural infection, and at least 2/3rd of those natural infections never got tested at all, and then there's the piles of people who swear up and down they caught it in November of 2019 and other self-diagnosis.

And the virus is basically just an mRNA vaccine with extra stuff to self replicate. The virus RNA genome is its mRNA so its the same thing as the mRNA vaccine. You know you can beat the vaccine because you know you beat the virus. You might still benefit from antibodies to the rest of the genome, which is great. Natural immunity just comes at the cost of a pile more side effects and a bunch of actually self-replicating virions that might put you in the hospital if things spiral out of control.

Apparently 67.6% of India has SARS-CoV-2 antibodies [1]. This can't be attributed to vaccination since nowhere near that percentage of India has had a vaccine for it.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/india/india-covid-antibodies-...

I’d expect natural immunity to be more robust to future covid mutations than vaccination, since our bodies will have been exposed to and responded against all parts of covid’s biology rather than just the spike proteins.

It is if I understand this correctly: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...

As far as mandates are concerned, it's far easier to prove vaccine-based immunity.

The questions I have about natural immunity is:

1) how "strong" is it relative to the vaccines in use?

2) how variable is it?

3) how to you prove it?

4) and how expensive would that be at scale?

> Yet, for some unknown reason, natural infection is NEVER talked about anywhere.

Because early on in the pandemic immunity became a political issue and those who suggested you could get immunity were seen as right-wing wackos. To this day there is some level of immunity denial out there.

Not to mention there is a vested interest to promote vaccines, which boosts revenue for pharmaceutical companies. Vaccine promotion is one of the reasons I think the CDC hasn't straight out said kids aren't at risk of covid. If they did, nobody would bother getting their kids vaccinated (because quite frankly they don't need to!).

I honestly think most of this crap doesn't make any sense and doesn't really add up because most of this is fueled by hysteria, non-stop fearmongering and politics. A small fraction of what we are doing is actually sound disease mitigation. The rest is just humans running around like chickens with their heads chopped off.

It's because their antibody response is similar to those who got just a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine, which is not enough to protect against Delta variant. I suspect natual immunity played a huge role in prevention of vanilla COVID and Alpha variant but it's not with Delta which probably contributes to the recent spike.

It's not worth the exception when the vaccines are free and easy to access

Individual preferences need not apply. The "smarter" mob demands you remove your mask and ignore acquired immunity and instead submit to experimental vaccines because they'll feel better about it.

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