Covid-19 immunity holds up over time | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 immunity holds up over time

directorsblog.nih.gov

27 pointsnihkolberg40 comments

"Covid vaccine immunity" is a misnomer. The "vaccine" does not provide immunity to the virus, but claims to provide a reduction in severity of symptoms. The mRNA shots are prophylactic shots, but have been called vaccines to encourage people to take them.

If the "vaccine" provided immunity, it wouldn't drop off after 4-5 months. The question now is, how often do you need to be redosed? If you got a booster shot in November, it's almost time for your 4th shot. Thanks, but I'll take my chances until long-term safety data has been made publicly available.

Of course immunity holds up, why did we ever think otherwise? Our immune system let us survive for thousands of years, why would it suddenly fail on this Nth disease?

When people have a good thing going, they tend to do whatever they can to keep it going.

I hope the COVID clingers will continue to be looked back on as a cringe embarrassment in the history books for all of eternity.

This makes so sense because even the most cautious want it to be over. Like what’s the evil plan anyway? Mruhahahaha people will be wearing masks indoors forever and … profit?

I think the concern may be that overly anxious folks could have difficulty adapting to new facts.

Also, a third of people in the US were happier with lockdown and have their own reservations about return to normal

I'm certainly happier with remote working, but lockdown? Feels like prison.

I think the status for the whole package, but a lot of people also like feeling free of social obligations.

When lockdowns bring non-servant class comfortable work from home privileges of course they praise the idea it's too dangerous to go back to work instead just rallying for better worker rights aka work from home. By any means.

To feel like prison you'd have to be made to "stand by your door" twice a day, eat crap every day, and practice invisibility to prevent being shanked. You'd have to be able to see behind you in the meds line to prevent a kidney stabbing. You'd be practicing being as ugly as possible so the gaol rapist doesn't take a shine to you.

How is lockdown anything like prison? I keep hearing about how lockdowns and mandates are like prison, and I just cannot see it at all.

People just love telling other people what they can’t do.

Wait, are "new facts" related to "new science"? How do "new facts" get generated?

I would say that new facts are facts that were not known or knowable before.

We learned a lot about covid over the past two years. Vaccines came along. Treatments have improved. The virus itself has changed. Populations have prior exposure. More study results are available. Etc. We continue to learn.

Apologies if my wording was confusing.

Some were known before, but authorities have changed their stance based on political factors without new underlying data.

I agree. I guess politics and news coverage come after the more objective stuff I was thinking of. I guess not everyone interprets the facts the same, which is why I mentioned anxious people, who might have a tough time at the end of the pandemic, whereas other people had a tough time at the beginning, etc.

Facts have a half-life.

Yes, really. https://www.google.com/search?q=half-life+of+facts

In fact, there have been studies that measured the half-life of facts in each branch of science (it's not the same in all of them). This is done by taking a large number of well-known once-thought-good papers spanning a large period of time and then asking current reputed experts which ones have been falsified or rejected since their publication.

Ok, to be fair this is really a half-life of what-we-think-are-facts rather than a half-life of actual facts. The problem is that facts that are so universally obvious that no one would disagree they are facts... such facts are hard to come by. So it's not hyperbole to say that facts have a half-life even though it may seem more correct to say that knowledge has a half-life.

I'm not sure if 'half-life' is the appropriate term, as it typically connotes random decay. But the decay of popular facts appears to be anything but random; rather, it appears to be strongly correlated with political expediency.

Half-life has been used in the literature.

I don't believe that's what they were saying at all ("keep a good thing going"?) but I appreciate your effort to steelman it into a reasonable point of view.

Ah, that's the way I read it. I was being charitable. I understand this is a contentious issue.

People who love telling other people what to do and how to live have had an absolute field day with the pandemic. The amount of admonishing and screeching about everyone needing to wear their masks and get vaccinated and how mandates are good and how people who are against mandates are Nazi's, has been absolutely insane. These people get a sick joy out of it, they revolve their lives around it, and I'm really not sure how they're going to cope now that the pandemic appears to be coming to an end for the time being - or at least, now that it's being accepted as a part of life, finally.

It's not so much monetary profit they're receiving, but rather the self satisfaction knowing that they totally schooled someone on the internet about proper COVID etiquette - while simultaneously ensuring a red wave this November (which is why the shaming has toned down within the past couple weeks now that the reality is setting in about the midterms).

Ask a Covidian...

You are 100% correct of course, and pretty much EVERYONE from the US government to MSM to Covidian fanatics were wrong because they were stupid or liars or power hungry or all three.

Well, in my personal experience with covid, yes, I am absolutely correct. I got it 3 times, so immunity is not complete, but it improves every time.

First time around, I thought I would die. Second time, it was pretty bad but okay-ish, and third time I was still working. It should also be noted that I was particularly tired and stressed out before catching it the second/third time.

Anecdotal evidence of course, but indeed 100% correct.

That doesn't mean I'm calling all of those people liars. You're jumping to conclusions.

The focus on antibody levels is just bizarre and unscientific. That doesn't really tell us much about how immunity holds up over time, so it's disappointing to see this type of article published by the NIH. What matters more over the long term is cellular immunity.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

I agree. So many of these studies just seem to test for one type of antibody in a test tube, leaving out other types of antibodies and the rest of the immune system response (which is not fully understood).

I'd like to see more numbers tracking infections across populations through time. Israel has done this with some of their studies.

We'd have a lot more data if we asked every positive case how many shots and/or prior infections they had, and when, and a bit about their masking/lockdown precautions. I don't know if any states or counties are doing this.

!mods this is misleading starting with the title. The actual article is titled "How covid-19 immunity holds up over time", which is not necessarily a direct assertion.

There are literally 100s of thousands, if not millions of healthcare workers, why could they only perform this study on 48 of them?

I imagine it’s quite expensive to test 100,000 people. Isn’t the idea to simply fine statistically significant results? That’s all you’re going to get funding for?

The world spent trillions of dollars fighting this pandemic, and is still hemorrhaging cash all over the planet. A few more blood tests for such an important claim would have been very much worth it. Not saying test all 100k, but 48? I guess that's statistically significant, but it seems like a hard task to find a cohort of 48 people that can statistically represent all the US health care workers.

Lack of leadership, organization, manpower, and intelligence.

This is the same reason that we are two years in the pandemic and still haven't evaluated repurposing many safe medications to reduce mortality. It will be very sad if we could have reduced global deaths by 25% using drugs that were sitting on the shelf the whole time.

The NIH is sponsoring the ACTIV trials of repurposed medications. Could have been started sooner, though.

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/medical-research-initi...

Yeah, my point exactly. It readouts out at end of this year, ~3 years in. There are no physical limitations preventing this from being done in months. It is the human factors that fuck it up

Title should be: "How COVID-19 Immunity Holds Up Over Time"

And it should be noted that this is vaccine derived immunity.

Agreed. Title is a bit misleading when 'how' is omitted. That being said, I found this section particularly interesting:

> The neutralizing ability of antibodies against all other spike variants showed a dramatic decline from 1 to 6 months after the second dose. While there was a marked decline over time after both vaccines, samples from health care workers who’d received the Moderna vaccine showed about twice the neutralizing ability of those who’d received the Pfizer vaccine. The data also suggests greater immune protection in fully vaccinated healthcare workers who’d had a breakthrough infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Seems that there is an element of protection from surviving natural infections and from vaccine usage.

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