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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Why is "natural infections and recovery produce a better immune response than a vaccine" so controversial? Has it been this controversial for any other disease?

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As you can see from some previous replies, it’s because people are less concerned with what’s true than with how (they believe) information will influence the behavior of others.

The apparent prevalence of this attitude in media and public health is eroding the credibility of those institutions, imo.

Sort of like when the FDA insinuates that Ivermectin is unsafe because it has also been used by veterinarians in addition to its human indications.

Off-topic but does anyone have a mechanism by which Ivermectin would be helpful with Coronavirus? It seems bizarre that an anti-parasite medicine targeting a eukaryote would have any efficacy against a virus.

I'll give you one (total supposition, I Am Not A Veterinarian): most people don't "get infected" with worms, but some have exposure and have immune responses that may not ever rise to the level of "symptoms". anti-parasitcs might assist and allow more robust responses to other health challenges.

Don't look too deep into how much life we host even when healthy; it'll squick you out.

So far a multitude of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have tried but not found significant benefits from using Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 in a single-drug treatment regime.

However it's worth noting that certain multi-drug treatment regimes are looking quite promising [1][2].

Furthermore, early multi-drug treatment (before severe symptoms) using existing widely available medicines has been proven effective at reducing hospitalization and death [3][4][5][6][7]. Many front-line doctors have been using such techniques since the beginning of the pandemic, because they had to - as there were no vaccines yet and no RCTs to guide them so naturally the only option was using and combining existing medicines with established safety and efficacy profiles, the same strategy used for other difficult to treat diseases and cancers.

[1] Ivermectin in combination with doxycycline for treating COVID-19 symptoms: a randomized trial https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33983065/

[2] Baricitinib plus Remdesivir for Hospitalized Adults with Covid-19 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33306283/

[3] Timing of Antiviral Treatment Initiation is Critical to Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/psp4.1...

[4] Clinical outcomes after early ambulatory multidrug therapy for high-risk SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection https://rcm.imrpress.com/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?a...

[5] Early multidrug treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) and reduced mortality among nursing home (or outpatient/ambulatory) residents https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...

[6] Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

[7] Multidrug treatment for COVID-19 https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ddt/advpub/0/advpub_202...

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously y’all. Stop it.”

FDA… You approved the drug for use in humans and it has less side effects than acetaminophen / paracetamol… y’all.

That was bs from the FDA, but it’s ok because the folksy “y’all” is endearing to who I assume they were internally calling ”flyover hicks self-medicating with horse paste”.

All they had to say was we have not approved this medication for covid and the animal applications are not approved for use in humans, their dosages can be very dangerous.

Agreed, it's very much an attempted form of manipulation by hardcore pro-vaccine people. There's a line of logic among anti-vaxxers of "I'll take my chances", and studies like these -- which show that taking your chances with COVID, surviving (which might be overwhelmingly likely), and then going on your merry way gives you equal or greater protection than the vaccine. Hardcore pro-vaxxers would much rather the narrative be "the vaccine, and only the vaccine, will protect you."

It’s controversial because nobody can package and sell “natural” immunity. Given that there are about 7.5B people in the world, RNA injections are, apparently, only good for 90 days, and that Pfizer (or someone) gets $20/injection, the market is about $600B a year.

Do you remember 20 years ago when the people on TV said that terrorism was an existential and imminent threat and the result was defense and surveillance companies made massive fortunes? The more things change…

Just kidding. Public opinion shaping campaigns are a dangerous conspiracy theory and nobody of any public office or Fortune 500 company ever lied for money and nobody ever tried RNA injections for humans until, like, just now.

Please also consider the incentives for vaccine passports and "verified digital identities".

> RNA injections are, apparently, only good for 90 days

Er, what?

Perhaps they're referring to 90 days of storage?

Just like encouraging people to run around unvaccinated and mask free keeps your donors who make a $2000 per treatment Regeneron very happy.

Is this a dig on Fauci who just decided he recommendeds it?

Or on DeSantis who has a investment firm donor who is not even in the top100 investors in the antibody treatment company?

Side question, do you fall for smear campaigns without fact checking the claims yourself?

You can only get natural immunity by getting the virus and hoping you don't die.

Sure Pfizer makes lot of money from the living, but I guess they will make less money since some of us are no longer among the living.

I guess the funeral industry will be very happy, indeed. The welfare state saves money on not having to care for a sick elderly person...

I think it's because people draw the wrong conclusions. Sure, if your body was stuck fighting COVID19 for two weeks and you then survived (i.e. excluding those pesky 700k Americans who didn't make it), then you are better prepared than if your body was stuck "fighting" COVID19 vaccine for half a day (of sleepiness or at most mild fever).

The PROBLEM is that people then say "oh well then to protect myself better against COVID19 what I should do is get infected with COVID19, rather than get vaccinated". I have NO IDEA why so many people are jumping to that conclusion.. but oh well..

> The PROBLEM is that people then say "oh well then to protect myself better against COVID19 what I should do is get infected

Both approaches carry risk, yet your statement presents as if the risk of vaccination is 0. And also excludes the idea that opting not to be vaccinated is a legitimate choice for the millions and millions of “cases” that have already been infected.

The risks of the vaccine have been shown to be a minuscule fraction of the risks of being infected with covid.

If one has acquired immunity then the risk of taking the vaccine is entirely unnecessary.

> Sure, if your body was stuck fighting COVID19 for two weeks and you then survived ... then you are better prepared than if your body was stuck "fighting" COVID19 vaccine for half a day

From what I've read, it's less about severity of infection and more about the fact that the vaccine only introduces one specific aspect of the virus (the spike protein) to the immune system, while the actual virus introduces... all of itself to the immune system. So natural immunity ends up being more comprehensive and resistant to variants than the vaccines.

imo people seem to be stuck in a somewhat contrived line of reasoning about the 'choice' between taking the vaccine or getting infected. hundreds of millions of people, possibly the majority of the adult population have already contracted covid 19 involuntarily, and the vast majority of these people survived which suggests they should have developed natural immunity and yet increasingly within the first world, this immune but unvaccinated population is being faced by public and private mandates that restrict their rights and possibly put their employment at risk unless they take part in what is effectively an ongoing experiment with mrna vaccination, one that increasingly seems to confer them little actual benefit.

I remember reports of the first reinfections as well as early talk of asymptomatic cases, where the news then tentatively concluded: and thus we hope a vaccine will be able to get good immunity where the having of covid does not. A few days ago was the first time I heard that knowledge challenged.

So it's not so much that it's unbelievable, more that it was established knowledge for more than a year and only now we're finding out these people were fine the whole time? Why then do we give them a booster dose that could be going to Africa?

(I don't mean to have those questions answered by the way since it's off topic; the questions this information conjures up are in answer to why it, at first glance, sounds controversial.)

> Why is "natural infections and recovery produce a better immune response than a vaccine" so controversial?

Why would that be your default assumption? Is it because ""natural infections" are natural and natural "should" be better? That is straight-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Have you considered the counternarrative that "vaccines are engineered to produce a strongest possible response" and you should therefore expect them to perform as designed, unlike haphazard nature.

Or perhaps consider that either might be true, and discard any prior assumptions about "natural = better".

> Has it been this controversial for any other disease

It's "controversial" because politics this time. It's not the default assumption in this or previous diseases, because it's often not true.

The last time this was raised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107854

Not to claim now that those links are the whole story, but they do represent a whole lot of prior knowledge.

So it seems that there is some debate and nuance on this topic. My (simplistic) understanding is that vaccines produce a different and in some ways stronger response than the disease that they mimic, as they are literally designed to do. The COVID vaccines mostly contain Spike protein and therefor produce a very strong response ... but only to spike protein. recovery from infection produces response to that and other parts of the virus.

> Why is "natural infections and recovery produce a better immune response than a vaccine" so controversial? Has it been this controversial for any other disease?

Confirmation bias

There are some diseases it is not true for. Mostly ones that attack parts of the immune system (eg. Measles). Probably wouldn't be true for HIV either.

It makes it very easy for people to lie about. Both to themselves, ("well i was a little sick around month X, so that was probably covid, so i don't need a vaccine") and to others.

It's no easier than lying about vaccination status. Antibody tests are widely available, yet none of the pro-vaxers are willing to accept them as evidence of immunity. Why do you think that is?

As I understand it, Israel does count previous infection similar to vaccinated status.

Not an argument, just a data point.

I wasn't aware of that, but that's good to know. It's certainly not counted anywhere in America that I'm aware of.

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