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Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if after being vaccinated it might be beneficial to intentionally get infected with the actual virus?

The downside is of course the risk of severe illness and having to quarantine until the virus is cleared, but the upside is that the resulting natural immunity might be effective against a possible future vaccine escaping variant.

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On a public health level you would be making the probability of a vaccine escaping variant more likely by incubating a bunch of virus in an environment where vaccine escaping mutations have a competitive advantage.

On a personal level, it seems like if you succeed in getting it you're likely going to be feel fairly sick (a fairly substantial downside in my opinion), and the upside seems to be relatively minor since in the case of a vaccine escaping variant we will be well positioned to make a variant of the vaccine for it quickly and with minimal red tape.

I suspect, given the way things are going in even the most highly vaccinated countries, everyone will end up being exposed eventually now.

Honestly, I kinda always assumed the game plan was first to get as many vaccinated as we could, then use exposure and/or more vaccines for variants, and eventually we have an inbuilt resistance to most the tricks it can throw at us and it becomes more like the flu and/or rhinovirus seasonal variants that we're already used to.

Those healthy individuals who can survive infection will gain nasal/mucosal immunity in upper respiratory system, which is not available via blood/serum antibodies from an intramuscular, non-sterilizing vaccine.

Dr. John Campbell had a video on this last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20DxL8KhvgA.

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