The strange neglect of natural immunity
brownstone.org
brownstone.org
The WHO specifically recommended to hold off on boosters because developing nations still have not vaccinated their vulnerable populations yet.
It's possible legislators have less confidence in the tests of natural immunity than they have in the vaccine passport, for whatever reason.
And maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think I know some people who might _try_ to get covid (instead of the vaccine) if it meant they could travel.
This is a place where "most people" are wrong. Natural immunity is globally inferior to vaccinated immunity.
Vaccines are safe and effective, and it's easy to document that you got a shot. Receiving a vaccine is helpful even if you've recovered from infection naturally.
Cool, tell me more. I have a background in biophysics (with a touch of immunology and virology) but I don't know a whole lot about that.
I'm not up-to-date on all the latest covid science, but I don't think I remember many cases of people getting reinfected.
Nuclear physicist here, so I can't hang when it comes to crunchy immunological details, but here's the gist as I understand it:
The vaccines use a designed and stabilized version of the spike protein, which leads to antibodies that bind more strongly and thus more effectively. People aren't likely to be reinfected by the same strain, but mutations can reconfigure the spike protein slightly, making it bind more strongly to cells, and less strongly to those antibodies.
"Naturally" derived antibodies may be as good as the ones from a vaccine, but that's a gamble. In aggregate, people who have been previously infected (with a strain other than delta) are more likely to catch/have poor outcomes from delta than people who are fully vaccinated, by a factor of 2-3. This is a fairly recent result, and I can't find the reference, sadly.
The absolute risk is low, but the relative risk is huge. Also, when you look at the total risk budget, again, vaccinated immunity just swamps natural immunity. It's only the naturalistic fallacy to think otherwise.
Recovered individuals have vastly superior immunity to variants than vaccinated. mRNA vaccines have been show to drop significantly in preventing infections after 6 months. Natural immunity doesn’t and also you have a profound misunderstanding, natural immune system targets many locations on the virus not just the spike protein. Reinfection rates are estimated to be well under 1%, meaning 99% effectiveness, Pfizer is now estimated to 40% effective against infection.
What studies do you have to show that natural immunity is inferior to vaccinated immunity?