Natural immunity 99% efficacy vs vaccine 95% efficacy

7,890 Views | 69 Replies | Last: 3 yr ago by Old Buffalo
eric76
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NicosMachine said:

Salute The Marines said:

The issue is that vaccination is safe and statistically harmless for all demographics. Initial covid infection is not.
But if you've had Covid, there is no reason to get a vaccination. That is being ignored by vaccine pimps.
I had covid in May 2020. At the end of June 2020, a test for antibodies to covid showed none.

Hopefully, the vaccine helped my body produce antibodies.
88planoAg
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YouBet said:

How are we defining natural immunity? Are we conflating both immunity derived from getting covid and then having antibodies with simply having innate immunity?
I don't think innate immunity exists since this was a never before seen virus. My understanding is that the recovered have 2 types of immunity, though. One represented by the presence of antibodies, then durable immunity, which doesn't require the presence of antibodies to effective. Someone with more medical knowledge will come along and flesh that one out, I think it is t-cells but I'll get the details wrong if I go further.
cisgenderedAggie
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B cells. B cells are the reason your blood doesn't need to turn into a useless sludge of old macromolecules slowly decaying while you don't need them.
Nitro Power
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Zobel said:


Quote:

the fact that natural immunity is better than vaccine.
This is not a fact.
Man made is better than God made. . . Noted
Jbob04
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Zobel said:

One paper != fact.

We can even say it seems like, or it's probable. But there's as many studies that show one way as there are another.

Both breakthrough and reinfection rates are very low. But there's no definitive answer to the question of which is lower, especially when you add in the complexity of variants.

Your savior Fauci even said natural immunity was better and would last years. Did you forget or did you rewrite history?
Zobel
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What a strange comment. Is your angle that God made the virus? Or that God didn't make the human immune system which the vaccines activate? I really am struggling with what you believe, what you think I believe, and how it's relevant to the discussion.
Nitro Power
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Zobel said:

What a strange comment. Is your angle that God made the virus? Or that God didn't make the human immune system which the vaccines activate? I really am struggling with what you believe, what you think I believe, and how it's relevant to the discussion.
You are apparently struggling with reading comprehension as well.
Zobel
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Also a strange comment. Fauci isn't my savior and I have no idea what you'd base that on. Fauci doesn't have a monopoly on truth any more than the OP of this thread does.

In God we trust. All others must bring data.
Zobel
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Explain it to me, then.
thirdcoast
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Isreal doesn't have a monopoly on truth either. But the facts are steadily chipping away at the BS narrative...

Again, when you look outside of the lab microscope petri dish, you see that outcomes in the real world show that millions of years of natural biological evolution outperform a few months of incredible ingenuity by man to crosswire an immune response. Looks to be better by factor of 5 or 6, which aligns with the less than 1% reinfection rate seen in separate independent studies in real people.

This shouldn't be a shock. The difference between US and Isreal is that this news is not suppressed. They look at the virus, natural immunity and vaccines like they look at flight passengers in their airport. No PC bullshyt.

Quote:

More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously that is, less than 1% of the new cases. Roughly 40% of new cases or more than 3,000 patients involved people who had been infected despite being vaccinated.

With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with COVID.

By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.


https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762
Zobel
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So what you're actually saying is that you never had an honest question and this was just an excuse to talk about the "BS narrative"?

Cool - good to know.

Israel is not the only place in the world studying this, and their results don't jive with ongoing monitoring in the UK. There is an explanation, and it may be that the vaccines aren't working well. I've given you examples of real world data, including literally checking every single person who flies into an airport, but you only seem to want to engage in confirmation bias. Why bother asking about facts and data when you already think you know the answer?

And the biological evolution angle is precisely why vaccines work. They use your highly evolved immune system to fight the virus.
thirdcoast
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Not personal, but...

The first study you posted was about blood titer levels, not actual people reinfection studies. It's been shown that lower titer levels in natural immune responses are inconclusive at best.

Your Qatar airport PCR study had no antibody (serology) testing. Therefore it eliminated 2,488 people (20%) from the naturally infected sample, many of which would have shown up in the final results for prior natural immunity and neg PCR, with serology blood tests (instead of 12 wk window). The Lancet study I posted had same issue, but to lesser degree since they could include subjects 4 weeks out from a positive antibody test to final tally of those natural and negative. Probably best explanation for the difference in outcomes your airport study and my healthcare worker study.

Finally, it's very important to eliminate those with both natural immunity AND vaccine when comparing to a sample of only natural immunity. That's one HUGE advantage the vaccine has in studies of an asymptomatic or mild virus. That's baked into vast majority of data analyzed at moment. As the vaccine is pushed more an more to "everyone", that skew becomes larger and larger.

Serology tests like the TX Cares Study show both S and N protein levels, so you can definitively throw out those who were both naturally infected and vaccinated, for a true comparison of vaccine only vs natural only. Imagine if people didn't know they got vaccinated and were tallied on the natural only side of ledger with both protections.

Considering all this, it's extremely probable that studies will become much more controlled which prevents vaccines from taking credit for natural immunity, resulting in a leap frog effect for natural immunity. So what has become obvious over last few months, will likely become definitive in next couple years. We will ultimately find that Fauci's original gut feeling and honest expert opinion was true, and his rhetoric during vaccine pushing mode was BS narrative. A gov simpleton messaging strategy for a public too lazy to critically think thru what we are here.
VetSurg
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Prior to the COVID mania, medical professionals understood, as it was well documented, that a natural infection ALWAYS produces superior immunity. Vaccines are attenuated (in varying ways) so as not to produce the illness which is to be prevented by the vaccine. That attenuation often results in a lower level immunity. Hopefully, it is protective. It is never superior.

Influenza requires annual vaccination because it has a unique ability to "antigenically drift" so that it is a little different every year. Science tries to anticipate the "drift" when producing the vaccine. Some years, they get very close and the vaccines work well. Other years, not so close and the vaccine is poorly effective. But once you are infected with that year's flu, you're completely immune to reinfection that year.

Corona viruses do not antigenically drift.
Zobel
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Quote:

It's been shown that lower titer levels in natural immune responses are inconclusive at best.
That's another open question. For example, see this from Nature Medicine "Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection". Which is kind of a case in point - my main issue in that you're taking limited snapshots of information and drawing conclusions which are too broad or too strong. I'm not even saying you're wrong, I'm saying it's not as certain as you're making it out to be.

Quote:

Your Qatar airport PCR study had no antibody (serology) testing. Therefore it eliminated 2,488 people from the naturally infected sample (12 wk window), many of which would have shown up in the final results for prior natural immunity and neg PCR, with serology blood tests. The Lancet study I posted had same issue, but to lesser degree since they could include subjects 4 weeks out from a positive antibody test to final tally of those natural and negative. Probably best explanation for the difference in outcomes.
I don't understand the objection to PCR vs antibody testing. They eliminated people with recent infection because it doesn't help answer the question they were asking, which was "whether vaccination and prior infection were associated with lower risk for testing PCR positive." A recent positive test would preclude them from being categorized as "reinfection" vs ongoing infection.

At any rate, they excluded 2448 people who were recently infected, and 3472 who were recently vaccinated for the same reasons - and still had a total of ~500,000 people in the eligible group. This seems like a dubious reason to question the study. Sometimes a result is just a result, and you can only say "interesting, looks like we need more data."

Quote:

Finally, it's very important to eliminate those with both natural immunity AND vaccine when comparing to a sample of only natural immunity. That's one HUGE advantage the vaccine has in studies of an asymptomatic or mild virus and the vast majority of data analyzed at moment. As the vaccine is pushed more an more to "everyone", that skew becomes larger and larger.
Shrug, you're basically saying the study could have included people who were actually recovered in the vaccination group by mistake, if they did not know they were exposed/infected/recovered. But this bias is on both sides of the equation - it also applies to the people who were unvaccinated but also no prior infection.

Quote:

Considering all this, it's extremely probable that studies will become much more controlled which prevents vaccines from taking credit for natural immunity, resulting in a leap frog effect for natural immunity. So what has become obvious over last few months, will likely become definitive in next couple years. We will ultimately find that Fauci's original gut feeling and honest expert opinion was true, and his rhetoric during vaccine pushing mode was BS narrative. A gov simpleton messaging strategy for a public too lazy to discuss what we are here.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you're using words like "extremely probable" and "obvious" when I don't think it is either extremely probable or obvious.

You seem a whole lot more interested in confirming your priors than actually finding out the answer based on all available evidence.
Zobel
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VetSurg said:

Prior to the COVID mania, medical professionals understood, as it was well documented, that a natural infection ALWAYS produces superior immunity. Vaccines are attenuated (in varying ways) so as not to produce the illness which is to be prevented by the vaccine. That attenuation often results in a lower level immunity. Hopefully, it is protective. It is never superior.

Influenza requires annual vaccination because it has a unique ability to "antigenically drift" so that it is a little different every year. Science tries to anticipate the "drift" when producing the vaccine. Some years, they get very close and the vaccines work well. Other years, not so close and the vaccine is poorly effective. But once you are infected with that year's flu, you're completely immune to reinfection that year.
I think it should be noted that we've never vaccinated like we are now. As you know we are not using an attenuated virus in the mRNA or J&J vaccines, and the mechanism is not comparable to an attenuated virus. It also kind of sidesteps the fact that we do have vaccines which produce sterilizing immunity, which is as good as it gets.

What you're saying may well be true. Some other things could be true as well, like

- A person who develops a very mild illness after exposure may not develop sterilizing immunity (seems highly probable)

- A person who develops a very mild illness may not develop as robust of an immune response as a person who is vaccinated (seems possible, but very difficult to test or confirm) or as person who has a more serious illness

- Protection may vary based on the original exposure - for example, when compared to someone who is vaccinated using the spike from variant A, a person who was exposed to variant B may be more at risk from reinfection to variant C than the person who was immunized against A. This depends on what changed between the variants.

You can also combine the above to get into all kinds of strangeness.


Quote:

Corona viruses do not antigenically drift.
This seems to be an open question. Two recent papers:

Evidence for adaptive evolution in the receptor-binding domain of seasonal coronaviruses
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.30.352914v1.full

A human coronavirus evolves antigenically to escape antibody immunity
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009453
thirdcoast
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Quote:

Shrug, you're basically saying the study could have included people who were actually recovered in the vaccination group by mistake, if they did not know they were exposed/infected/recovered. But this bias is on both sides of the equation - it also applies to the people who were unvaccinated but also no prior infection.


Unvaccinated with no prior infection (group 2) is irrelevant when comparing the natural immune response (group 3) to vaccine induced immune response (group 1).



This is where you are most easily proven wrong. What I'm saying is that people who get vaccinated know with 100% certainty they were poked with a needle and are also recorded in the official vaccine database, and therefore eliminated from group 3. Conversely, there 100s of millions of people globally who got covid and have no knowledge or record of it, some even tested negative when symptomatic positive (like I did). So it's not a mistake, it's a margin of error that can't even be quantified without a serology test or applying an avg (which wasn't done).

No, that bias doesn't also apply to the natural immune response side of equation (group 3), because they required a record of positive infection and eliminated vaccinated. You would have to hang your hat on false positives in group 1 to make your argument. We know the extremely rare rate of false positives vs false negatives, so that argument scores more points for natural immunity group 3.

You can tell me exactly how many vaccinated and 90 day window PCR positive people were excluded from naturally immune group 3. But when it comes to how people with the N antibody protein made it into group 1, you can only shrug. The airport testers should have taken a conservative estimate on the avg rate of asymptomatic or very mild COVID cases and removed that % from group 1. But they didn't and therefore got less reliable results.....like most or all of the PCR studies out there.

Zobel
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How can I be easily proven wrong when I'm not taking a position?

Quote:

What I'm saying is that people who get vaccinated know with 100% certainty they were poked with a needle and are also recorded in the official vaccine database, and therefore eliminated from group 3. Conversely, there 100s of millions of people globally who got covid and have no knowledge or record of it, some even tested negative when symptomatic positive (like I did). So it's not a mistake, it's a margin of error that can't even be quantified without a serology test or applying an avg (which wasn't done).
Yes, follow you. You're saying there are four groups (well, let's expand to five for clarity's sake).

Group 1A - actual no previous infection, vaccinated
Group 1B - unknown previous infection, vaccinated
Group 2A - actual no previous infection, unvaccinated
Group 2B - unknown previous infection, unvaccinated
Group 3 - known previous infection, unvaccinated

Comparing Group 1 collectively to group 3 contaminates what you're interested in which is group 1A vs group 3. This is why I said "included people who were actually recovered in the vaccination group" (this would be group 1B).

I'm fine with that, and we can say then that this is an incomplete analysis. I did a search for a serology study like you're describing and I can't find one.

Do you know of one?
Cowbird
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Clearly you don't believe in science.
eric76
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VetSurg said:

Prior to the COVID mania, medical professionals understood, as it was well documented, that a natural infection ALWAYS produces superior immunity. Vaccines are attenuated (in varying ways) so as not to produce the illness which is to be prevented by the vaccine. That attenuation often results in a lower level immunity. Hopefully, it is protective. It is never superior.

Influenza requires annual vaccination because it has a unique ability to "antigenically drift" so that it is a little different every year. Science tries to anticipate the "drift" when producing the vaccine. Some years, they get very close and the vaccines work well. Other years, not so close and the vaccine is poorly effective. But once you are infected with that year's flu, you're completely immune to reinfection that year.

Corona viruses do not antigenically drift.

My understanding is that the HPV vaccine provides better immunity than one gets from having had HPV. I assume that's not the only one like that.

Are you sure that the covid variants we are seeing are not the result of antigenic drift?
thirdcoast
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That's my point. There is no way to segregate group 1 into A and B in the airport study. It's all B. That's the bias I'm referring too and it's the same in most, if not all PCR studies. They can't entirely prove who in their sample is both naturally infected and vaccinated. There is certain to be naturally immune people scoring points for vaccines in group 1. Group 3 doesn't have any skewing bias like that.

"

The Texas Cares Act has a study ongoing with ability to segregate by A and B. Im in it now....and hope to see some results in the coming months on studies like that.

https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3208844

Zobel
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Yeah I saw that post and it is interesting.

In the meantime we have to wait for more info I guess.
rafer69
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"and there's been evidence that a person who has gotten sick plus a booster is ultra-double-secret protected. "

Can you share this evidence? I'd be interested in reading this as it relates to my situation.
Zobel
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01609-4
rafer69
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Thanks. Interesting though it seems a little convoluted in its conclusions.
Question: wouldn't an infected/recovered person have long term T-cell response?
Zobel
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Immunology is painfully complicated and I'm not an expert.

I don't know.
chap
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01557-z
rafer69
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Very interesting. Thanks!
thirdcoast
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chap said:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01557-z


Quote:

For SARS-CoV, a coronavirus very like SARS-CoV-2 that was originally identified in 2003 and causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the continued presence of high concentrations of neutralizing antibodies in blood serum for more than 17 years was reported in 2020. Wang and colleagues' results suggest that long-term immunity might also be expected for SARS-CoV-2.


The sad thing is that we knew about the Cov-1 immune response this whole time, yet everyone assumed Cov-2 was completely different, with absolutely no evidence of that.
Zobel
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I replied in the other post you talked about cov1. Papers are very narrow and you can't apply them too broadly outside of their actual statements. The conclusion is "might" in that.

No one assumed anything - I think that's the issue. If you read the things being said, the answer is we don't know or we don't know for sure, so err on the side of caution.
thirdcoast
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You mentioned you don't follow mainstream media much. Probably why you can't see all the bad assumptions and misinformation spewed out to public over the last year. Unfortunately the masses of people around us form opinions based on those "news" sources.
thirdcoast
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Textbook example of "experts" bull****ting public based on "studies". This moron just looks at higher spike antibody number in vaccinated and ASSUMES that means it's stronger. The actual data in breakthru and reinfection counter this assumption, yet the "expert" pushes the vaccine by any means.

Quote:

"The amount of natural immunity is less, duration is less and ability of Delta to get around natural immunity is higher."


3:15 mark


What amazes me most is the consensus of "experts" who say the vaccine offers a "broader response", when we know that natural immunity delivers broader antibody proteins. In fact, the next Gen of vaccines are looking to incorporate the nucleocapsid protein because of its durability seen in the natural immune response.
BlackGoldAg2011
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thirdcoast said:

The best vaccines on the market have an efficacy rate of 95% and the reinfection rate is less than 1% in unvacinated covid survivors (a year later). Doesn't that make the natural immune response better at preventing infection? What am I missing?

I know there are a lot of lazy people out there who "think" they got infected and never confirmed. But should the med community still be out telling "everyone" to get vaccinated or very rarely mentioning natural immunity?

*If you say many natural reinfections are mild and unrecorded, I could say same thing about vaccinated infections. So let's stick with the existing numbers, studies and trials.
maybe this got covered already further down, but to address the bolded first paragraph, that's not how efficacy is calculated. the calc would be efficacy=1-(#s/#c) where:
  • #s is the number of people in the study group who contracted the virus
  • #c is the number of people in the control group of the same size who contract the virus (the number you would have expected the study group to get sick without the immunity being tested)

so 1% reinfection doesn't mean 99% efficacy. if the expected rate of infection in the control group was only 2% for the study period than that's only a 50% efficacy.

I agree by the way, that based on the few studies available, natural immunity is likely on par with vaccinated immunity, maybe slightly better or worse, but close.
thirdcoast
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Thanks, "efficacy" is wrong word, and I conflated it with vaccine breakthrough infection vs natural reinfection, which is what will ultimately break the narratives going fwd.

Main point being that the actual infection rates we are seeing in society are showing that natural immunity is simply more durable, or at least very strongly trending that direction.

As more serology studies (like the one I am in) start testing for both S and N antibodies, that will only hurt vaccine stats and help natural immunity. There are practically zero vaccinated people making it into natural immunity stats, while there are likely millions of naturally immune people being reported in vaccinated stats. I haven't seen that key point made by anyone else. Not to mention the 20-30% false negative rate in PCR testing studies getting phased out and replaced with definitive serology tests.

When we get to a place where stats are reported in the 4 buckets below, the data will be more trustworthy, and knock vaccines down a couple pegs.

1) prior infection, vaccinated (N & S)
2) prior infection, unvaccinated (N & S)
3) no prior infection, vaccinated (S)
4) no prior infection, unvaccinated (nothing)
FTACo88-FDT24dad
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Zobel said:

Your natural immune response and the immune response caused by the vaccine are the same thing. That's the brilliance of vaccination in general... our bodies are already really good at fighting infections.

The reinfection rate and the breakthrough rate after vaccination seem to be comparable. A large observational study looked at this in the Qatar (here). Comparable means - very low.

People who have recovered and people who have been vaccinated probably have similar resistance to infection. But its complicated, yo. The truth is we don't really have a ton of evidence about either reinfection OR efficacy vs variants. This kind of stuff normally happens slowly, we're cramming decades worth of study down into weeks and months. We want to have clarity about this now, but it's just not there.

On the other hand, we know that multiple vaccinations produce more immunity, and there's been evidence that a person who has gotten sick plus a booster is ultra-double-secret protected. The downside to the shot is low-to-none, we have the vaccines, so there's no policy reason not to. Particularly if, for example, a triple vax or recover+one shot produces sterilizing immunity (which means you straight up don't get infected any more).

Your last paragraph is not really correct. A very mild actual infection may not trigger a strong immune response. In some way the mildness of the infection implies a mild immune response. The various vaccines are designed to trigger a strong response - otherwise they don't work. The response from the vaccine with regard to triggering spike protein antibody production looks to be even stronger than a natural infection. But antibodies aren't the only part of the immune system... that's why the vaccine causing aches, etc is good - that means your body's immune system is being recruited to respond to the spike protein the vaccine is making your produce. Immunology is stupid complicated.


Please post more.
thirdcoast
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Quote:

The downside to the shot is low-to-none


That's true, certainly for non immunized, and in the individual. But why not take a vaccine every month? Or instead of at 6 months, every 3 months? Its wasteful, and selfish. People are dying as we speak with no access to quality vaccines partly because the US is pushing to meet a target and demanding naturally immune get a vaccine because they are "less protected". That assumption is based on the higher spike antibody level and not actual vaccine breakthru and natural reinfection data which says opposite.

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