I'm sad this conversation has been flagged. It does not reflect well on the HN community that we can't discuss the topic of how to confer immunity in a rational way.
Current vaccines aren't as effective against catching Delta, they are very effective against symptoms, hospitalization, and death, so everyone must get vaccinated.
Being vaccinated to the point where you don't become part of a flood of patients overwhelming the healthcare system is a good thing. The vaccine making COVID a mild virus to the vaccinated is a huge success given that we don't really have great treatment options for serious cases other than hoping your body fights it off.
As I'm sure you're aware, the statements are "vaccines don't protect against transmission of delta" and "everybody must get vaccinated to allow safe use of hospitals by non-COVID patients again", but strawmen will say whatever you want them to say.
"Kamala Harris said that she'd happily take a [hypothetical] vaccine that doctors and scientists recommend — but absolutely not one touted by Donald Trump"
That's a far cry from what you said. She's not referring to an actual "Trump vaccine", as that didn't exist. She's saying that if Trump recommended something and scientists didn't - as was the case for hydroxycholoroquine, for example - then she would quite reasonably avoid it. Trump didn't recommend vaccination until March this year, by the way - long after scientists had weighed in, the first vaccines had been rolled out, Trump himself had been vaccinated, and he was no longer president.
>"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it, absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I'm not taking it," Harris said.
and the second one's video byline says
>Senator Kamala Harris said during Wednesday's vice presidential debate that she will only follow instructions from health experts on whether to take a coronavirus vaccine, not President Trump.
and the third one says
>"I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about," she continued in the clip from an exclusive interview airing Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" at 9 a.m. ET. "I will not take his word for it."
I'm no spin-doctor, but I don't think that's a sick burn against the grandparent comment, which suggests that
>>[t]he only people who think Trump was involved in vaccine development are Trump himself and his supporters.
Harris actually said that Trump's endorsement, without accompaniment by actual medical professionals, wouldn't convince her. You chose those articles, and that is what those articles you linked to said. Again, strawmen say whatever you want them to.
Every "booster" vaccination going into the arm of a low risk population is a vaccination that is being withheld from a vulnerable population in a less "privileged" country.
The WHO specifically recommended to hold off on boosters because developing nations still have not vaccinated their vulnerable populations yet.
I think most people agree that natural immunity is as good as a vaccine. But I do see some possible reasons to prefer the vaccine to proof of natural immunity.
It's possible legislators have less confidence in the tests of natural immunity than they have in the vaccine passport, for whatever reason.
And maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think I know some people who might _try_ to get covid (instead of the vaccine) if it meant they could travel.
> I think most people agree that natural immunity is as good as a vaccine.
This is a place where "most people" are wrong. Natural immunity is globally inferior to vaccinated immunity.
Vaccines are safe and effective, and it's easy to document that you got a shot. Receiving a vaccine is helpful even if you've recovered from infection naturally.
Nuclear physicist here, so I can't hang when it comes to crunchy immunological details, but here's the gist as I understand it:
The vaccines use a designed and stabilized version of the spike protein, which leads to antibodies that bind more strongly and thus more effectively.
People aren't likely to be reinfected by the same strain, but mutations can reconfigure the spike protein slightly, making it bind more strongly to cells, and less strongly to those antibodies.
"Naturally" derived antibodies may be as good as the ones from a vaccine, but that's a gamble. In aggregate, people who have been previously infected (with a strain other than delta) are more likely to catch/have poor outcomes from delta than people who are fully vaccinated, by a factor of 2-3. This is a fairly recent result, and I can't find the reference, sadly.
The absolute risk is low, but the relative risk is huge. Also, when you look at the total risk budget, again, vaccinated immunity just swamps natural immunity. It's only the naturalistic fallacy to think otherwise.
You have completely misunderstood the CDC article I think you are referring to. It proved that recovered individuals benefit some also getting a single vaccine dose. It didn’t measure recovered vs vaccinated.
Recovered individuals have vastly superior immunity to variants than vaccinated. mRNA vaccines have been show to drop significantly in preventing infections after 6 months. Natural immunity doesn’t and also you have a profound misunderstanding, natural immune system targets many locations on the virus not just the spike protein. Reinfection rates are estimated to be well under 1%, meaning 99% effectiveness, Pfizer is now estimated to 40% effective against infection.
