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Comment by andrewclunn | Hacker News Reader

> The immune response after vaccination more or less mimics what happens after infection, with one major difference. In a SARS-CoV-2 infection, the immune system sees the whole virus. The most effective vaccines, however, are using just one viral protein to elicit a response: spike. And whether antibody levels will also plateau after vaccination isn’t yet clear. Wherry and his colleagues analysed immune responses in 61 people for 6 months after their first shot, finding that antibody levels peaked about a week after the second shot and then fell quickly for a couple of months. After that, they declined more slowly.

Clearly this article's author is a conspiracy theorist and should be censored for spreading misinformation.

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Please don't post this sort of flamewar comment to HN, regardless of what your views are or how right you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What? This has been well established in the scientific community for a while. No conspiracy at all here.

It's called sarcasm. Any acknowledgement of natural immunity has been deemed unscientific conspiracy theory in the mainstream in the US for the past year, only accepting vaccination as a solution.

I remember I read Randall Munroe's What If to my daughter a few years ago and there was a chapter about the common cold. The conclusion was was that eliminating it was impractical for economic reasons - we couldn't have survived a global lockdown, and the virus mutates too fast to create an efficient vaccine. It felt a bit surreal seeing testing the scenarios described by Munroe in practice.

That doesn't make sense. A major discussion in the public since Covid caught on was about herd immunity -- and that infection would drive some of this. Maybe the concern is that we aren't inclusive of natural immunity in our policies. But that is purely an issue of bureaucratic process (for example, there should be no false positives in administering a vaccine) and incentives (we don't want people to try to get infected since infected people can transmit the virus), not any statement about the science related to natural immunity.

To be fair, the herd immunity idea was floated around quite early in beginning of the pandemic. But it was quickly thrown out when governments saw the infection rates and deaths spike up. Ever since, vaccination has been the dominant (hammer) solution for the virus. (Vaccination) Has been the background track for this pandemic and still is to date. Natural immunity is only coming back because Omicron is not as deadly as the previous strains. It was never an option before.

Exactly. The incentives didn't line up for natural immunity as a course for herd immunity. It wasn't about the science, but policy. And it was never an argument about the science (besides science trying to understand the delta between different types of immunity, including different types of vaccines and natural immunity). That's why I'm perplexed about the "conspiracy" talk. No more than there's a conspiracy about wine consumption in the US.

It doesn't make sense if you are actually following the science and not The Science like politicians are. Over 2021, natural immunity was dropped so hard in the US that the vaccine passports/requirements popping up here make no allowances for recovery from covid - it's vaccination or nothing.

I think OP was being sarcastic.

how so?

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