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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

This is somewhat incorrect. Not all vaccines include a sample of the virus they're protecting against (see the mRNA vaccines for covid-19).

Also for some viruses (again see covid-19), it's still advisable to get a vaccine even if you've already been infected. The protection rate and longevity of the vaccines can outweigh infection based antibodies dramatically.

In the case of HIV, it's potentially quite different, because HIV is such a unique disease, that yeah, a vaccine might not help anyway. But otherwise, your comment doesn't apply to vaccines in general (and it didn't seem like you were replying towards any specifics of HIV)

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Vaccine for coronavirus recommended for its immune-building benefit even in persons who had infection, this is to reduce likelihood for more infection in the future. I am doubting that this applys on the HIV since nobody is getting it then beating the infection, just supressing it.

Also some evidence that vaccines are helping with long covid https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/18/long-covid-s...

The difference with mRNA vaccines is they let your body build antibodies without it even knowing the virus itself

> Also some evidence that vaccines are helping with long covid

By what possible mechanism? Does this imply that long COVID is a result of some small amount of lingering virus?

I was under the impression that long COVID was a result of damage caused by the initial infection - not some continuous infection of the actual virus.

A substantial proportion of long covid cases share similarities (particularly demographics) with other syndromes of unknown mechanism, particularly chronic fatigue syndrome.

It's still unknown what causes long covid. Lingering virus is one hypothesis that's still plausible. Indeed some people believe it precisely because the vaccines seem to be helping significant numbers of people (but not everyone, they can also make it worse for some people).

It probably is not really doing anything, I would think replacing the nocebo of being infected (or supposedly being infected) by SARS-CoV-2 in the past with the placebo of getting vaccinated (more recently, so you get a recency bias boost) makes up most of the "helping". If not that exactly a similar psychological re-targeting effect is probable.

Long covid is not sufficiently studied to indicate whether vaccines help.

Many of the patterns associated with long covid suggest that is a mix of one condition that has a mechanism probably similar to chronic fatigue syndrome and the other is the manifestation of long term sequelae that is common with other respiratory viruses.

My guess is that the vaccine might help with the CFS-like symptoms.

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