I mean, this shouldn’t even be a question. The CDC says you need the COVID-19 vaccine even if you’ve had COVID-19 — either two weeks after the last symptoms, or 90 days after the last symptoms, depending upon whether you were treated with monoclonal antibodies (if you were treated with monoclonal antibodies you have to wait 90 days for them to die out).
But because people don’t want to read all the footnotes on the CDC site and wonder “Why?”, I’ll explain why. If you’ve recovered from COVID-19 you have antibodies to *the specific variant of COVID-19 that you were infected with*. You can still get infected with other variants of COVID-19 that are just different enough to evade the antibodies you developed to defeat the first variant.Thus we had the spectre of people getting infected with COVID-19, getting well, then infected *again* with COVID-19 — just a different variant of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, the vaccines available in the United States target the spike protein of the COVID-19 virus. This spike protein is what gets the virus into cells. Most mutations of the spike protein break a coronavirus’s ability to get into cells and reproduce, so it doesn’t mutate fast or much at all. Thus a vaccine that targets the spike protein targets all currently circulating variants of COVID-19.
The other issue is the length that the antibodies last. Your body doesn’t generate long-lasting antibodies unless it thinks you’re going to get attacked by that virus again. Generating antibodies against a one-time thing is a waste of the body’s resources. If you get sick with a mild case of COVID-19 and get well within a couple of weeks, your body goes “meh”, and never generates any long-lasting antibodies. (Note — I’m dumbing this down significantly, it’s more complex than that, but this is as good a way of thinking of it as any). As the short-term antibodies die out, within around 90 days, your immunity wanes.
Meanwhile, most of the vaccines (other than the less effective Johnson & Johnson) give your immune system repeated jolts. What that does is tell your immune system, “ugh, this nasty is sticking around!” and it generates a longer-lasting immune response.
Now, the next question is how much longer does this immune response last? And that… is hard to tell right now. But it looks like after about six months it starts declining again.
Thus the thought of giving *another* booster shot at about six months. The goal is to give your body yet *another* jolt and since this jolt is six months after the previous jolt, the goal is to tell your body, “hey wait, I can’t let my guard down even after six months!” and hopefully have the immunity last for years after that. This isn’t a new thing. Childhood immunization schedules often do things like this. For example, once you’re six years old, you may have had *FIVE* doses of the DTaP vaccine, spaced out to give you long lasting immunity to diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. It’s just that you don’t remember these shots because you were a smol child. Meanwhile, us oldy moldies know about the Shingrix shot. You space that out a couple of months for the same reason.
So anyhow, that’s the science behind the CDC’s recommendations, more or less. Yeah, I simplified it somewhat, I don’t want to talk about the different kinds of immune responses and so forth that are triggered by viruses and vaccines, but there *is* science behind it. Meanwhile, there’s no — zero — science behind any advice that says “don’t get immunized if you already had COVID-19.” That…. just isn’t correct. There’s not a single scientific paper *anywhere* saying that you get long-lasting immunity against COVID-19 merely by having COVID-19. That’s just not how upper respiratory viruses work, whether we’re talking the common cold, influenza… or SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
— Badtux the Healthcare Penguin
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My ex-BF is one of those who think he doesn’t need a vaccination because he had COVID (in 2020) & he’s got “immunity” now. He wants to get together in the worst way & I refuse to see him (for a variety of reasons) … now that he was refused to get vaccinated, I can add that to the long list of reasons. Sometimes stupidity is a gift that keeps giving.
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There’s plenty of cases in the literature of people who got sick multiple times with COVID-19 as new strains of SARS-CoV2 arrived, so your ex is an idiot. Good riddance, eh?
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I got the J&J shot in May, and now it’s looking like my booster shot should be Pfizer or Moderna. I’ll decide which one by what the data is saying when they are actually authorized.
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And a COVID-19 anti-vaxxer checked in… and got checked out just as quickly. I swung the ban-hammer so fast on him that I didn’t even bother “Pie”ing him. I just whack whack spam spam delete delete.
The thing is, everything that I stated up above is backed by literally hundreds of scientific research papers published in the most reputable journals in science.It represents the scientific consensus about the facts surrounding COVID-19, immunology, and virology as best we know them today.
Everything the anti-vaxxer said… wasn’t. He had nothing backing up his histrionics except bald assertions and appeals to authority that failed upon the fact that they appealed to an authority that, uhm, wasn’t (“I have hundreds of doctors backing my opinion!” — so? I can find hundreds of doctors willing to declare that the Earth is flat too… being a doctor doesn’t make you an expert in things that aren’t part of your field of expertise, such as geography, immunology, and virology!). But wait, am I appealing to authority too? Nope. I’m not saying that I believe the actual virology and immunology researchers because they’re experts. I’m saying I believe them because they’ve done the hard work of actually doing research and getting it published, and the actual observed data published in their research papers back up their assertions.
You’re entitled to argue your opinions on this blog. You are *not* entitled to argue basic facts based upon measured objective reality. The sky is blue regardless of whether you are color-blind and think it’s gray. Facts are facts, and I refuse to allow deniers of reality a platform on my blog.
– Badtux the Fact-based Penguin
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If only newspapers would treat their LTTE page the same way, but they just gotta be “balanced” and “present both sides.” Because there are two (and only two) sides to everything – Repub and Dem, labor and ownership, etc. Except sometimes there are two, three, four, or eleven. And sometimes there is only one – Covid is one of them, so ban away Tux.
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None of us are qualified to “do our own research”. So yes, I do rely quite a bit on authority. And some authorities quoted by the nuts are automatically discounted. That is a shortcut, but it is a necessary one.
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What science denialists call “research” and what scientists consider to be research are two different things. I had the privilege of taking a graduate-level research methods course while in college, and what they describe as research there in no way compares to poogling while on the toilet, which is what science denialists think is research.
Basically, I look for whether there is experimental evidence backing up what’s being stated. If I am qualified to examine the experimental design, I do so, but furthermore, I check out whether there are multiple studies that arrive at the same conclusion from different sets of measurements. The singular of scientific studies is “anecdote” — i.e., it’s not science unless it can be replicated.
Everything I stated in my post is backed up by experimental evidence published in scientific research papers in reputable journals, not by some Doctor McQuacken who has a degree in pediatrics.
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For someone as skepticynical as you, Tux, you put a lot of faith in the official pronouncements about the vaccines. I do not share your confidence. What you’re saying (along with the all-in-for-vax-only officials) is “This shit doesn’t work so good, so let’s use even MORE of it!”
Let me say up front that I’m double-vaccinated with the Astra-Zeneca monkeyvector juice, the only choice available for mouldyaged people like me. (I sometimes ride my bike past the factory outside the town of Broadmeadows that makes the A-Z for all of Australia.) I didn’t do that JUST because it’s mandatory for health care workers. I got the shots because I want to improve my odds of not dying. There aren’t many 100% sure things in life (aside from the fact that we WILL all die eventually) but if one can tilt the odds in one’s favour, one would be a fool not to.
I also wear N95 masks everywhere (screw those side-gappy surgical masks, which help protect others from one’s own viralbreathspew, but don’t offer great protection to the wearer.) I get heaps of N95s at work, and instead of binning them after four hours as we’re supposed to, I pocket ’em to wear on the trains, in shops, the lifts at my building, etc. I also try to avoid crowds as much as I can when I’m not at work, which is not much of a problem for an alienated lone wolf like me. I LIKED it when we were locked down (longer than anywhere else in the world) because for quite a while, that helped eliminate the virus from Aussie society.
I’m under no illusion that the vaccine will prevent me from getting batflu, though. Or Long Covid. As you say, the antibodies fade away, because the body does not waste energy in making something it does not currently need. I’ve seen references to studies saying the antibody levels with booster shots are even less than with the first vaccinations, due to similar conservation-of-effort effects. The make-up of the boosters isn’t tweaked to meet the Delta variant, either — it’s just more of the same.
You don’t mention the potential for antibody dependent exacerbation (ADE, an acronym I think we’ll be reading a lot more about in the future.) The more times one gets shot up with a substance, the higher the odds that it will trigger an autoimmune response. I reckon that’s extra-true for an exotic foreign substance such as messenger RNA, which is why I was happier to get the somewhat conventional A-Z (and I’d be even more pleased if there was an attenuated virus approach that seemed to work better than Sinopharm’s). I will not be taking any boosters.
TPTB across the world have bet the house on vaccines as the one-shot (pun intended) solution. That makes more money for Big Pharma, and allows TPTB to pretend that life can go back to 2019ormal. They’ve done little to improve ventilation in buildings, study non-vax alternatives such as the unmentionable iver-med, or work big-time on changing humanity’s herd-like behaviour. The things I’ve seen being pushed are monoclonals, some in-the-pipeline new pills and other stuff that makes money for drug manufacturers. Profits matter more than public health.
Public officials lie about everything. You posted this about the time that Colin Powell, a notorious but glorified liar going back to when he helped cover up the My Lai massacre, finally carked it. I don’t disbelieve EVERYTHING that comes out of the mouths of the officialyappers, but I don’t give them much more credence than I do for some guy on the street. At least that guy is openly stating what’s just his opinion, without the patina of “trust me, this is the truth.” What’s true is that they’ll say whatever makes money for corporations, short- or long-term. If lots of people die later because of that, the official doesn’t care, because the money has been made NOW, and the futurepeople can deal with the deaths when they happen.
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I don’t put a damn bit of faith in official pronouncements about anything. I do put a lot of faith in fucking *science* though — I mean, these damned computers we’re typing on are proof that science fucking *works*. I looked at the science behind viruses and the journal articles to verify that the CDC wasn’t slipping me the gas. Everything lines up and makes sense.
Regarding ADE, we’ve given the COVID-19 vaccines to hundreds of millions of people. Not a single one of them had an ADE-type reaction to the vaccine. It just isn’t happening. Half of the United States is vaccinated, but 99.2% of COVID-19 deaths last month were of unvaccinated people. Basically the only vaccinated people who die are people whose immune system is shot to shit by immune suppressive drugs, like Colin Powell, who was on chemotherapy for cancer that basically had his immune system in the dumpster. When you look at the vaccine it’s clear why this is the case. It triggers a reaction to a single foreign protein that doesn’t exist in the human body. It doesn’t create a reaction that targets anything else.
As far as vaccine safety goes:
mRNA vaccines are safer than adenovirus-vectored vaccines because adenoviruses can cause rare but sometime fatal reactions in the body — Guillain-Barré syndrome and thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS). There have been no — zero — instances of the mRNA viruses causing this issue, despite the fact that 95% of those vaccinated in the US are being vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine.
Adenivorus-vectored vaccines are safer than conventional vaccines because they don’t need (can’t use) adjuvants to increase the immune response, because adjuvants would trigger a reaction against the adenovirus before it could insert its target DNA into cells to generate the target protein.
Conventional killed / weakened virus vaccines generally need an adjuvant to generate enough of a reaction be effective, and these have been associated with lipomas and general auto-immune issues. Plus you’re relying on the killing/weakening to be effective. There’s been cases of bad batches where the virus wasn’t deactivated and ended up infecting people with the disease it was supposed to prevent. That’s absolutely impossible with a mRNA vaccine — mRNA vaccines don’t contain any virus parts at all. They just rig your cells to generate a protein, the spike protein.
Not to mention that conventional vaccines just don’t work for a coronavirus. The only way to deactivate a coronavirus is to get rid of its spikes that insert it into cells, and if you do that, you end up with something that the immune system doesn’t recognize as the virus. There’s a *reason* why we’ve been trying — and failing — for over 50 years to create a vaccine for the common cold. Coronaviruses just aren’t amenable to using a conventional vaccine approach.
Regarding the vaccines targeting a variant — as I mentioned, they are targeting the spike protein, and so far the spike protein is not changing in any significant way between the variants. Which makes sense, the spike protein is what gets the virus into cells, and if it changed much the virus likely could no longer get into cells. It will probably eventually mutate to something that’s not targetted by the vaccine if COVID-19 doesn’t die out, but hopefully we get enough people vaccinated that COVID-19 will eventually die out.
Anyhow: I believe the science, not the people. If the person refers me to science, I’m reading the science — and any other related science — but I don’t believe shit people tell me without verifying it first. And that idiot on the street carking nonsense? Fuck him. He’s more likely to get people killed than some dude with the CDC. Especially since, here in the USA, we have a very decentralized healthcare system and public health system where if the CDC is shooting the gas, the CDC will get pushback from thousands of public health officials all over the country who, like me, know how to read the science and look at the stats. It just isn’t happening — because the CDC might fudge around the edges, but generally is sticking with the science.
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Thanks for the long and well-thought-out reply, Tux. I agree with most of it, especially about the various classes of vaccines. As for Guillain-Barre, I’m old enough to remember lining up at my high school in 1976 for the swine flu vaccine, feeling patriotic that I was doing my part to help halt a scourge, and then learning how it was causing a lot of G-B and had to be yanked off the market. That was the start of my vax hesitancy. Which has been made easier because I am one of those lucky people who never gets sick. Cosmic roll of the dice gave me a great natural immune system.
I am still sceptical (as they spell it here) of the potential for bad reactions after repeated boosters based on the lipoproteins and other adjuvants needed to make the mRNA juice work. We shall see as time goes on. We’re all strapped in on a giant roller coaster ride with no telling whether the tracks just come to an end and we go sailing off the edge…
I am less sanguine about the virus mutating to a less-lethal form. There;s a commenter on Naked Capitalism who goes by the nym of “GM” who has a microbiology background. Yves Smith has enough faith in him to highlight the comments he makes, and she is a strict guardian of what gets said there. He’s mentioned various genetic squiggles that Covid is making that alter it to become more virulent and better at evading immune responses. The guy gets into the weeds with descriptions of named proteins and chemical pathways that are above my understanding. He seems to know his stuff and is not the typical Internet blowhard. Good outcomes are not a given.
The one thing that gives me hope is the Novavax approach, using artificially created spike protein fragments that can be sprayed up the nose periodically to activate a localised immune globulin response that stops the virus from attaching to cells where it gets in. It’s under development and testing, not likely to be in widespread use before mid-2022, but that could be humanity’s way out of this.
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The lipid particles used to insert mRNA into cells look like a regular fatty acid to the immune system and aren’t going to trigger an immune response in and of themselves unless there is an adjuvant telling the immune system, “hey, look at these, they aren’t supposed to be here!”. Looking at the ingredients list for the Moderna vaccine, the ingredients are the mRNA bits themselves, the lipid particles that they’re encased in to get them into cells, and a buffering solution to ph-balance the result. No adjuvant. As I pointed out, an adjuvant would be counterproductive. You *want* the particles to get where they’re going without the immune system noticing them. It’s the proteins generated by the mRNA once it gets into cells that you want a reaction to, not the lipid-encased mRNA particles.
I’ve unfortunately had to learn a lot about the immune system due to various health issues of no interest here, and I just don’t see any mechanism where this could trigger an immune event of the kind you hypothesize. And frankly, with roughly 100M people vaccinated in the US with these vaccines and with local public health official looking for adverse reactions like a hawk, I think we’re well past the pont where bad reactions would have happened if they were going to happen. So I’m going to get my booster as soon as the state lets me get it, because frankly, I trust the vaccine a shit-ton more than I trust the virus or the anti-vaxxers who are spewing bullshit telling me not to get it. Over a 100 million guinea pigs is plenty to tell me that the vaccine is far less risky than the alternative.
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bukko: I cannot believe you actually are implying that the horse dewormer is a legitimate tool for reducing Covid impacts? What’s next-bleach?
Thanks, badtux, for responding so thoroughly.
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