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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

Its important to note that Immunity debt is a concept that anti lockdown activists created in 2020. It was not in medical texts before that point, it never had any science behind it. It was a political term used to end mitigations against Covid not a scientific fact.

There is no rethinking here from serious science (The BMJ is a really bad journal and one of the ones that supported this garbage), the science on infections has been clear for decades, every infection damages us. Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects. Its not a subtle change, in Long Covid research its become increasingly hard to find controls, many people without symptoms show the same blood based markers of immune dysruption and cognitive slowing.

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Are you criticizing something other than what is in this article? This article fully rejects the immunity debt hypothesis.

The article suggests that covid infections cause immunity amnesia similar to other known viruses. This is based on shingles and EBV reactivation incidence being higher in people who had covid.

You should read the comment again. It says that this article is debunking something that was never a serious claim. That is the first thing it says, and it says it very directly. It is also set apart as its own paragraph, for emphasis.

>something that was never a serious claim

And yet was claimed again and again by e.g. pediatrics societies in Switzerland and France to justify ending every restrictions (thereby mass contaminating children before they could be vaccinated, and contributing to more spread and more mutations of the virus)

I'm not arguing the claim. I'm asking a person to read was said, and respond to it, instead of to something that was not said.

I think they mean serious in scientific terms, not in policy making.

> Its important to note that Immunity debt is a concept that anti lockdown activists created in 2020. It was not in medical texts before that point, it never had any science behind it. It was a political term used to end mitigations against Covid not a scientific fact.

It was a term coined to allow discussion of a reasonable hypothesis that had suddenly become relevant, which was then latched onto by people who found it useful. The causality that you are claiming is backwards.

No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.

In fact, doing what you're doing right now -- trying to present the hypothesis as activism in order to remove it from the realm of reasonable discussion -- is inherently political.

> Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects.

There is no good evidence for this claim. We have robust T- and B-cell mediated immunity to prior Covid infection, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands of papers showing it. Please stop.

The general origin of this meme is the article linked in the piece, which, if you read the abstract you'll see is making a very limited claim about early infection, and cannot be used to support the notion that "Covid damages the immune system" in any long-term sense, particularly when we know the opposite is true from many, many other studies:

https://academic.oup.com/jleukbio/article-abstract/116/6/138...

I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative:

> Ashish Jha, former White House covid-19 response coordinator under President Biden, has publicly rejected this hypothesis. “There’s a lot of bad information out there about how covid-19 damages the immune system. It really doesn’t,” he posted on X in early 2024. More than a year later, his view is unchanged.

https://x.com/ashishkjha/status/1747412684889354266

>nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared"

The flu didn't disappear, and we know very well why it almost disappeared: it is far less contagious than SARS-CoV-2, and masking and the huge dip in international travel stopped it.

>It's a hypothesis

Here in Switzerland (and in France), it hasn't been presented by pediatrics societies as an hypothesis at all, but as a fact and the main argument to reopen immediately. It has also been used again and again to explain the huge waves of infections of many illnesses that surged after the end of lockdowns, and absolutely none of them ever quoted that "immune debt is just an hypothesis", and none of them have suggested any other alternative hypothesis such as "SARS-CoV-2 has a detrimental effect on the immune system or health in general".

Because to admit so would be to admit the mass infection of children had been a massive mistake on their part.

>I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative

And Jha has no explanation for the increased, sustained (and now synchronised) waves of infections and illnesses that are plain to see. He has nothing. This is the fiasco of "masks aren't proven to work" again.

… masks literally aren’t proven to work, and in every true RCT (hint: there are almost none!) there is neutral to negative impact.

they are a creative fiction to help people feel like they have control over their environment, not a substantially evidenced intervention.

Randomized controlled trials are not a silver bullet. There is a reason why meta-analyses spend a good amount of ink sorting out and excluding RCTs for lack of power or other design mistakes.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/05/02/do-masks-work-rcts-rando...

> No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.

I hypothesize the rise in these less common infections is none other than Santa Claus. You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific.....the fact that it's complete made up bullshit that, like the parent says of the "immunity debt" concept, "never had any science behind it.", is what makes it unscientific. That it's made up and was never shown by any evidence.

Calling it anything other than a hypothesis is unscientific. Claiming it as a hypothesis is not.

We should dedicate resources to finding Russell's teapot. My hypothesis is that there's useful information left in there by the almighty creator of the universe.

You mean Joe?

So what? Is there a medical term for the beneficial effects of putting dirt into your mouth as a child? How often does the expression "common sense" appear in medical texts? Therefore "common sense" is politicized garbage!

"Every movement we make damages our muscles" is also a true statement and can be misused by idiots.

>Is there a medical term for the beneficial effects of putting dirt into your mouth as a child?

"hygiene hypothesis"

Importantly, though, humans evolved to live in environments full of random dirt microbes. We didn't really evolve to deal with repeated respiratory infections. Spillovers from wild animals would happen and kill a bunch of people from whatever group experienced them but then there'd be nobody left to infect and that strain would die out. It's only evolutionary relatively recently that our connected communities have become big enough to sustain this sort of disease. And the rate at which diseases cross over has increased rapidly as our population, contentedness, and meat diet has. Something like half the species of common cold didn't exist in 1800.

EDIT: Actually, I think learned opinion is that it might be our modern lack of intestinal parasites that could be making our immune system paranoid rather than a lack of dirt per se? Or maybe that's just the newer position with no consensus yet.

Common sense is politicized garbage. It's a defense that only serves to avoid needing to justify your opinion.

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