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Comment by vletal | Hacker News Reader

Is the amount of spike protein in the body during an actual infection larger? I.e. is it not still better to get vaccinatet rather than infected?

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From what I understand this is correct for the first dose. You still have few antibodies bwcause your immune system is learning about the invading new protein. In this case it seems plausible/obvious that the vaccine should be better for your body than the real infection because it can not replicate itself in an uncontrolled way.

During the second dose however, you have a immune system that is extremely armed to fight this particular protein. When you inject the second dose, a huge battle breaks out immediately. This situation can not come about naturally because we don‘t inject massive amounts of covid but rather inhale small amounts that can be easily fought off at the border by the now highly armed immune system.

I don‘t know how this could break havoc on heart cells but probably due to some collateral damage when the injected proteins reach the bloodstream.

This is an absolute layman’s understanding of things so please correct me if I‘m wrong. But I haven‘t seen this issue discussed/refuted by experts, yet.

Anti-bodt levels drop after some months though, according to what I have heard on news and read online fwiw, and that is when the second dose is recommended.

That might explain why I felt nothing after the first does, felt like I was dying after the second dose and nothing after the third and after getting infected. Interesting.

I know here in Norway the second and third doses have not been pushed on young men due to the heart issue. As I understand it health officials are not sure the boosters are better than getting infected for young men. Same reason why children are not getting the vaccine at all, for the vast majority of children covid is benign and the vaccine might carry risks on it's own.

You are incorrect. The immune response to contracting actual symptomatic COVID will be much higher than any vaccination. You get symptoms largely due to your immune response (up until you start getting actual directly damaging multisystem COVID and you're hospitalized). Symptoms are a good enough proxy to viral loads affecting your immune system, which pretty much proves your argument is flawed.

not a biologist by any mean, but i think location is very important, especially for an air transmitted disease like covid : mouth / nose / lungs are all part of the "outside" of your body, aka the mucosa. That's probably where the largest part of the infection takes place in the case of a natural covid infection.

Vaccines otoh enters your bloodstream and may result in infection everywhere in your body, touching many places that wouldn't be by a natural contamination process.

(disclaimer : please correct me if i'm wrong, and in all case never take medical advices from random people online)

This is not really true, vaccines first and foremost enter cells at the point of injection (intramuscular) through fusion of the lipid nano particles with the cell membrane, not via the ACE2 or TMPRSS route as the live virus. The immune response then depends on the migration of antigen presenting cells to the mostly peripheral lymph nodes where the full immune response is mounted including germinal centers. This has little to do with blood borne propagation. The virus on the other hand has multiple ways of entry into cells, ACE2 dependent, the endosomal route, syncytia formation and others that are still discussed. What is not up for debate though is that SARS-CoV-2 regularly infects other organs, including the kidney [1] and the liver were it does damage. It has also been shown to persist in organs like the intestine for more than a year in its live form. Due to the (super-)antigenic nature of the virus and the subsequent systemic inflammatory response the rate of post-Covid myocarditis also by far exceeds the incidence of myocarditis after vaccination in all age groups and cases tend to be more severe with the virus. It will be important to develop mucosal vaccines because current vaccines only elicit a very limited and short-lived IgA response and IgA antibodies, thanks to their shape, confer protection without excessive inflammation and offer protection against infection. But your description of the spread of the virus and the vaccine is just not accurate.

1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

thanks for the clarification. I think to have read that vaccine was in fact observed spreading much further than expected, reaching organs everywhere.

Since you seem knowledgeable, can you confirm ?

It absolutely is. There are some outlier cases (e.g “should I get the third jab even when I’ve had Covid?”) but overall it is clear the severity of all known vaccine side effects is a fraction of the severity of Covid and complications, after the likelihood of either are factored in.

That's not at all clear. Amongst people me and my girlfriend know it's the opposite. The effects of the vaccines were worse than that of COVID, both in terms of frequency and severity.

Actually the focus on my heart problems is weird and frustrating. I have a close friend who had a heart attack after taking the shots (it was never reported!) but by far the most common problems we've heard about affect women and their reproductive systems. Broken periods and the like. The frequency of this is massive compared to heart issues, but is being completely ignored.

Official stats on this are all useless for the reasons you can see in the first comment - deaths and injuries that are obviously vaccine related are constantly excluded. After insisting that someone previously healthy dropping dead two days after a vaccination is a mere coincidence, they report that there are miraculously almost no vaccine deaths or injuries and COVID is definitely worse. The entire medical and research system pushed vaccines on pain of them losing their licenses and careers, so you definitely can't take what they say at face value.

You're dismissing the data that is available in favour of speculation and anecdotes. That may be emotionally satisfying on some level, but it's no way to reach an understanding of the world.

Trusting data only makes sense if it's trustworthy. This data isn't for all sorts of reasons. The lack of concordance with observable reality is only one of those reasons.

The slices of reality you and I observe are just tiny parts of the whole picture. That is why we need data...

> Is the amount of spike protein in the body during an actual infection larger? I.e. is it not still better to get vaccinatet rather than infected?

The question is rather: Is it a good idea to get a second vaccine dose although you have already been both infected and vaccinated?

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