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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

> reducing healthcare system load

Un-scientific mandates affect the supply of healthcare workers, https://tamicam.substack.com/p/are-government-vaccine-mandat...

> It's ironic that the same camp currently blaming persons with acquired (Gold standard) immunity from prior infection of Covid ... for overwhelming medical systems, when by ignoring the actual immunity status of a person, they are undermining the entire medical system? The crisis they are creating goes against every basic principle of Immunology.

> Essential frontline medical workers last year are highly likely to have already been exposed to Covid at one point, so why does no one simply ask for their immune status, instead of “ Vaccine - or no job”? The vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus, as we know. Why are we instead firing all the workers who may not even have any need for the Jab at all, and aren’t willing to jeopardize their own health by taking it?

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I’d argue you don’t want healthcare workers who don’t believe in vaccination practicing healthcare (90-95% of doctors are vaccinated, for comparison, versus closer to 40-50% for nurses). This is filtering out workers who should be filtered out of the healthcare labor pool, workers who would be in close proximity to patients.

They’ve received other vaccinations to work [1]. They’ve been educated how vaccines work. There is no excuse for being unvaccinated as a healthcare professional.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/publications/topic/vaccinationlaws....

Many healthcare workers know the difference between gold-standard natural immunity, a sterilizing vaccine and non-sterilizing vaccine. It's a false dichotomy to reduce the world to vaccinated/unvaccinated, when vaccination neither stops transmission nor infection.

The most-protected group of people, who pose the least risk to other humans or healthcare systems, are the Covid-recovered, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.

Do you have a source that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced? Last time I checked studies showed that at least for the mRNA vaccines two shots was superior to natural immunity, as was natural immunity + mRNA booster shot.

This is not surprising and in line with many other infectious diseases, see e.g. [1].

I only read the term "gold standard immunity" in a US context and it's almost always politically charged.

[1] https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1412865782862725125

> Do you have a source that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced? Last time I checked studies showed that at least for the mRNA vaccines two shots was superior to natural immunity, as was natural immunity + mRNA booster shot.

From this recent study out of Israel: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.

To be clear, the study here is talking about immunity 6 months after a final dose. It appears that at least for the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against infection and even symptomatic disease decays fairly rapidly after a couple months. At that time it still appears effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization, though we might also expect that to decay over the next few months (too early to know).

Natural immunity decays too, but not nearly as rapidly per this study.

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