I’ve known too many people who’ve had a second go-round with it to trust “natural” immunity.
And I know people who had adverse reactions to the vaccine, including ER visits. This is one of many papers that go beyond anecdote. Pretending that vaccines are 100% benefit and 0% risk is the sort of messaging that is making people suspicious of the "expert" medical opinions being amplified.
I'm punching down a bit here but it's interesting to read MSM accounts like this that simultaneously point out nearly 1 billion Indians have antibodies against covid and then states this (emphasis mine):
"Overseeing one of the world’s largest vaccination drives (India has to vaccinate around a billion adults) is no easy task and the total vaccination rate remains sluggish when compared with other countries around the world."
Why does India have to vaccinate a billion people when only an estimated 400M are seronegative?
No one is pretending there is 0% risk. We know the risk is not 0% but somewhere around 0.001% for a serious adverse events. The paper you cite is a study of 18 individuals. I don’t hang my medical decisions on studies that small.
The reinfection rate after severe covid-19 is approximately 0.5-1%. Approximately 30% of those who are reinfected have respiratory failure due to the reinfection. This again is based on a small number of total events (63), but a large population sample size of ~9000. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab345/6251701
Studies have further shown that a
single shot of an mRNA vaccine can boost antibody levels in formerly infected people but a second dose provides no benefit. If we can better understand the characteristics of the ~1% that are getting reinfected (age, comorbidities?) and give them a single booster dose, that would be a more reasonable policy than the current one where everyone is treated the same regardless of past exposure. If there are no discerning features of reinfected individuals, then advising a single mRNA shot if >6(?) months after an infection would be a better policy than administering two shots. Providing the previously infected vaccines would require 200 doses of a 2-dose vaccine to get the same protective benefit as 2 doses in a seronegative individual, which should be a big consideration in countries with limited vaccine supply.
I am less confident that the risks of vaccination are as low as you suggest. It might be they are safe such that serious complications and death are ~1 in 100K but it's hard to take the efforts to determine vaccine safety in the US seriously. Israel and the UK are better places to look for this data and I believe a proper analysis will take some time. Until then, I don't think that treating someone with concerns for safety as a crazy person, in particular, given the novel nature of the mRNA vaccines and the lack of long-term safety data.
For the record, I am broadly pro-vax and got vaccinated at the first opportunity. I am in a relatively anti-vax region and can see how tone-deaf the CDC's messaging is on vaccinations among those with either reasonable or unreasonable safety concerns. It is the same sort of tenor that many Democratic politicians and partisans take towards the more red part of the US: arrogant, dismissive, and
smug.
I’ve known too many people who’ve had a second go-round with it to trust “natural” immunity.
There is also a huge number of people who claim to have had it in early days but we’re never tested due to early pandemic system lag and overwhelm, but in reality they could just as likely have had something else.
Quite right and I think a positive PCR test + symptoms should be the criteria to determine past infection, though you can also get the T-Detect test for those who are curious if their illness was possibly Covid.
