Past Covid infection protection against re-infection: a systematic meta-analysis
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
> The immunity conferred by past infection should be weighed alongside protection from vaccination when assessing future disease burden from COVID-19, providing guidance on when individuals should be vaccinated, and designing policies that mandate vaccination for workers or restrict access, on the basis of immune status, to settings where the risk of transmission is high, such as travel and high-occupancy indoor settings.
Note that the summary posits "when individuals should be vaccinated" not "if", as a base assumption and leaves no room for individual choice and risk-management decisions. Ditto on "designing policies that mandate vaccination".
To me, the way some of these things are worded displays a starting bias and lack of credibility.
When dealing with the unknown at "global pandemic" scale, it seems better to be safe than sorry, given that you're potentially juggling millions of lives.
All other things being equal, it is better to be safe than sorry.
But that's not the choice offered.
One thing that you never needed the benefit of hindsight to understand is that there's a non-trivial risk to the vaccines as well. This always exists. For instance, it took science years to understand the full impact of Thalidomide.
In the small chance that these injections end up having substantial long-term problems with something like cancer or fertility, a universally applied treatment could be the destruction of humanity.
Trying to compel universal injections was always a foolish risk-management decision.
(And, I'd argue, more freedom than the average American citizen in many areas, most notably healthcare.)
One of the biggest regrets is letting my US GC "win" to lapse a few years ago. Oh well, it all went down the toilet over there just the same, isn't it?
This is like whining that the pub requires shirt and shoes but more bizarre.
It has nothing to do with 'democracy'; in QLD at least GPs have no requirement for mask wearing so it's just up to the good old "free market" where businesses can set their own rules. Complaining that a GP requires basic healthcare precautions is truly bizarre to me.
I don't think 'cloth masks' should be used at all; I think people should probably be required to wear respirators in certain healthcare circumstances - particularly at GPs - as long as there are virulent airborne illnesses around.
And there are all the time, to the point where respiratory disease is a top five killer.
I think if we review indoor air quality guidelines & get better at indoor air filtration we can probably relax that requirement. But sitting in a closed indoor space with a bunch of sick people not wearing even the most basic protective equipment is not my idea of a good time. (FWIW my GP requires people who have cold/flu symptoms sit outside in a separate area and then they have to come in via a back entrance. So there's some segregation of symptomatic people, but not a huge amount.)
I mean, not really? Some things in life are more important than assiduously avoiding death by a respiratory infection.
Citations needed.
> what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
It’s trivial to find sweeping and unsubstantiated opinions. It’s trivial to find arguments on both[1] sides[2]. Why should I trust either? Either way, what evidence trivially and unquestionably supports “immense harm”?
This argument has been going in circles for 2+ years, it’s not like I haven’t seen more rigorously defended and less hyperbolic opinions before. That stuff, I’ll consider. What you and OP are doing is just noise.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/the-failin...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccine-mandates-...
It's clear to us all that you're not here in good faith.
I never spoke for anyone else in this thread. In your dichotomy of "us vs them", I am neither. You need a finer brush.
> but you've simply arrived at ... where you stop addressing arguments and fall back to simply impugning other's intelligence ...
I made no comments about yours or anyone's intelligence. Again, you need a finer brush to paint other people's opinions. If I felt you weren't intelligent enough, I wouldn't have attempted to talk to you. But your responses to me are giving me reasons to rethink the (f)utility of this attempt.
> ... and motives.
Nor did I make any comments about your motives; only your conduct. I have neither condoned nor denounced your motives. I only pointed out that you attacked your parent. You justified the attack by claiming that you had many people on your side.
This is HN, not a schoolyard. Having many people on your side does not give you the right to attack participants in this forum.
If you still do not understand this, know this: it only makes your point harder to agree with. The harder you are to talk to, the harder you will find people to talk with. I'd hoped you were intelligent enough to see your conduct was not helping you argue your case. I have no such hopes now. Goodbye.
Ok, so you’re presumably referring to this[1]? _Because manufacturers weren’t required to prove a reduction in transmissibility_, only safety and _efficacy_, and conflating transmissibility with effectiveness is misleading. An honest and more important question would be why did governments more or less call the crisis a wrap despite shitty immunization rates (at least in the US) and data that despite a significant and desirable impact on hospitalizations and mortality, transmissibility was still a problem[2] particularly with omicron? Or whether the vaccine technology or policy can keep up with variants today or tomorrow[3]? But a blanket statement like “no public health benefit whatsoever” is absurd.
> Almost no one except those in very high risk groups takes them anymore.
I don’t know what you’re getting at, here.
> People lost valuable careers
And people lost valuable lives. Including my mother in law who was not completely vaccinated when her husband brought it home. And my great uncle who was exposed in nursing care at a place that refused mandates. And my coworker’s brother who was forced to work despite his coworkers all being sick on the job. And so on, if we’re gonna start trading anecdotes.
> poured his heart and soul into caring for old folks in an assisted living facility
I’m sorry, am I to infer that he lost his job because he wouldn’t/couldn’t vaccinate while working with high risk people? Because, based on what I just said about my uncle, barking up the wrong tree for sympathy.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/23/1150032...
Consider: "How do I know when to go to the emergency room?"
The word "when" here is discussing circumstance, aka "whether", not the calendar.
If this was a casual blog post or something, I think you'd have a fair counterpoint that would muddy the waters sufficiently.
But this is published in a renowned scientific journal. Every word choice should be carefully chosen, and it's fair game to critique it as such.
In a parallel universe words only ever have a single meaning and nobody ever misinterprets anything, but not in this one.
> and it's fair game to critique it as such
Ambiguity was not the given critique, so this statement is both true on its own and also in context a giant nonsequitur.
It's not their fault that when assessing members of the response set for "when" you neglect to consider "never".
We're still having this dance in 2023? Businesses can likewise reject people for increasing the risk profile of the business provided such rejections don't touch on suspect classifications. And even that last bit is less likely to pose regulatory risk to businesses now that businesses in the US have been enabled by the Supreme Court to reject clients for things like sexual orientation.
> Ditto on "designing policies that mandate vaccination".
Workers under mandates can just as easily quit the job that has the mandate, or they can be terminated at will. Or rather, such is the typical argument I hear from the a certain crowd when workers complain about employers doing silly things that workers disagree with. If you're concerned that these workers should bargain for a right (to reject a vaccine) without fear of termination, maybe they should form a structure that can collectively bargain for said right for them.
I'm inclined to agree with others who say that your own biases are tainting your interpretation, but your biases are also particularly revealing.
But there's substantial government interest in having things like medical passports/IDs that provide them with substantial power and bureaucratic expansion (and more importantly, a huge financial win for the medical-industrial complex)
Additionally, those vaccines served as an idealogical purge mechanism where people who were willing to go against the grain and not just follow orders were drummed out of the government.
Hard to believe that they're just going to give up on this because it's the right thing to do.
It's not surprising that "old" variants don't result in protection against BA.1, but it would be a bit surprising to me if BA.1 didn't trigger protection against BA.1
I don't want to demand that we listen to experts, but I do regret people seem to have expected experts to never be wrong. And the current culture has gotten to where admitting a mistake is literally the worst thing you can do for a political stance. :(
1) Lacking a nationalized infrastructure to deliver food, utilities, and healthcare, some businesses are clearly essential
2) It is impossible to have unanimous consensus on what "essential" means
3) In some areas, businesses are not tightly scoped - the primary source of food for a neighborhood may also sell non-food items.
4) Even the definition of "essential" cannot be tightly defined - are manufacturers of spare infrastructure components essential? What about their suppliers? What about the contractor who refills their coffee machine?
Decisions had to be made, and administrators largely made the best decisions with the information available to them.
Only the alt-right spun it as a cure so they could also merrily point out to everyone when that didn’t come true.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/one-year-biden-said-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/coronavirus-vaccine-dr-fauci...
> White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci that the chances of scientists creating a highly effective vaccine — one that provides 98% or more guaranteed protection — for the virus are slim.
> Scientists are hoping for a coronavirus vaccine that is at least 75% effective, but 50% or 60% effective would be acceptable, too, he said.
> The FDA has said it would authorize a coronavirus vaccine so long as it is safe and at least 50% effective.
It was good when it came out, but based on it's effectiveness, it seems more of a stop-gap than a proper vaccine.
I look forward to people who pretend that it's the same as the flu catching it for themselves so that they can enjoy this "no big deal."
It's a sad state of affairs.
Where did you get 5%?
Last I saw you have a 20% chance of long covid, but it seems that was with older variants.
The thing that scares me is:
> up to two years after infection, at an elevated risk for many long COVID-related conditions including diabetes, lung problems, fatigue, blood clots and disorders affecting the gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal systems.
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/long-covid-still-worrisome-2...
So far COVID vaccines seem to confer protection for longer than flu ones, and the initial protection is generally higher.
Not sure if it's your case, but people often forget that every year there's a new flu shot per hemisphere, and its effectiveness generally hovers at around 40-60%.
OK
> whereas COVID vaccines do not prevent them, but merely lessen the symptoms and risk of hospitalization.
Is this something I can read on a peer reviewed study, or is it yet another creative definition of what "infection", "vaccine" or "symptom" really means?
“Compared with hospitalization for influenza, hospitalization for COVID-19 was associated with a higher risk of death (hazard ratio, 1.61 [95% CI, 1.29-2.02]).”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2803749
What would be interesting is to compare the numbers when flu was first happening vs covid.
It's just not guaranteed to be monotonic (particular strains can bump lethality upwards), and it doesn't help the people who die early on to the stronger strains, especially with an overloaded medical system.
Like, we don't have hospitals overflowing into makeshift tent farms outside with freezer trucks used to handle the overload of bodies until the crematoriums can get around to them anymore, either. It's definitely trended towards reduced lethality over time.
So, there are different evolutionary pressures. If we find out that Covid is actually latent in all of us years later (unlikely because we would have likely seen it with SARS-1 or MERS), then all bets would be off.
Incorrect. This virus has already spread by the time you're dying in the hospital and it doesn't "care" if you die or not. If it could spread more effectively during the transmissible period of the disease, while more effectively murdering you on the tail end, it'll murder you more, no problem.
The Delta wave was a good example of the virus mutating to become both more transmissible and lethal, quite successfully from its perspective.
The mechanism for waning virulence is that we've got T-cells which recognize conserved T-cell epitopes so the human race has some level of relatively permanent immunity now against the novel virus, and because immunity to neutralizing antibodies causes the virus to mutate and it is always competing with the immunity to its past self and that has a cost.
But it's not. I'd rather get the flu than covid.
The first time around sucked. It was basically a very bad flu for about five days. I caught it on a trip to southern Mississippi, and it didn't help that I had to drive >10 hours back home without stopping anywhere that I might spread it. I ordered medicine, food, and supplies for contactless delivery and drove it nonstop.
The second time I only knew it was covid because I was testing every time I had an inkling that I might have gotten it. I had a very mild fever and a runny nose for two days and nothing else. I isolated myself in my home office and managed to keep anyone else in my family from getting it, too.
Everything I've experienced, heard, or read strongly indicates that each round is significantly less bad than the last.
Was this really not already well understood?
All you seflish, entitled people that haven't helped or have "moved on" while serious illness continues to pervade society and unknown risks of repeated infection remain, have really shown your colours.
We know what you did last COVID wave(s).
Your comment is so full of emotion and offers zero insight into how to actually achieve it - therefore, it’s pretty safe to say your advice isnt helpful here.
Masks and vaccinations dont prevent infections in a meaningful way. This is backed by real data and anecdotal data.
I am yet to get COVID.
Saying "masks" without qualifiers is mostly pointless. Most people still associate masks with basically useless blue surgical masks.
Maybe I'm just lucky but the science of respirators is compelling and I find it hard to believe we wouldn't see a dramatic reduction in infection rates if everyone wore them.
Not even talking about vaccinations (we can't vax our way out of this, was always only part of it). Masking goes a long way but is also only part of it. Stop moving around. Stop gathering. Take precautions like distancing and avoiding indoor spaces. Stop the spread. COVID never ended and as it's airborne all spaces are unsafe.
We all know that Omicron defeated previous immunity, but once you get infected by Omicron, you're immune to Omicron variants. This is basic science, and the fact that some doctors were trying to convince previously-infected people to get vaccinated was anti-science.
Oregon had one of the lowest COVID infection rates the entire pandemic. Surely not due to anyone being particularly careful.
Apparently my grandfather helped design something with the cages, which is just weird for me.
Also there was likely cases floating around in the US before then, that was just the first confirmed case.
According to this timeline on the CDC website[1], there was reports of presumptive cases of Covid-19 in Oregon on February 28, 2020 as well. That's close enough to your timeline that I think it's more likely she just got Covid-19 (or a particularly bad case of the flu).
I unlike you though have caught covid-19 nearly every year since 2020 at least once a year. For me it seems like it provides protection for about a year but it doesn't last, and is individual. I kinda just expect to catch it every once in a while at this point.