No wonder natural immunity is being suppressed. Having broad and long-lasting antibody and T-cell immunity is bad for profits and continuing this state of affairs.
Since you've continued to use HN for ideological battle and ignored our request to stop, I've banned the account. Regardless of your views, comments here need to be higher-quality than this sort of shallow, inflamed stuff.
You think eg. my local belgian government has a vested interest in butchering its own economy so some american drug company can make profits?
Or is it more likely that they're pushing vaccines over natural immunity because the former doesn't involve furthering spread and risk of hospitalization as a prerequisite for getting it?
It's being suppressed by information outlets of all kinds. Authorities in the U.S. have admitted they need to "look into it", even though we're already in this about two years now.
> You think eg. my local belgian government has a vested interest in butchering its own economy so some american drug company can make profits?
Yes. Politicians are corrupt, welcome to the shitty nature of human beings. They will misbehave and commit atrocities over and over again, as proven by history. I don't think we've entered a special time in history where people in power are somehow immune to corruption now. This has already happened in Australia, with that one politician stepping down because she had received money from the pharma companies. Why wouldn't more of them be in that situation?
> Or is it more likely that they're pushing vaccines over natural immunity because the former doesn't involve furthering spread and risk of hospitalization as a prerequisite for getting it?
Vaccines use one's natural immunity. Furthermore, why isn't it a solution to expand hospital care, and/or take that care to people's homes? After all, we can clearly see the vax does not eliminate the chance of landing in the hospital, and places with 90%+ vax are still seeing spikes. There is clearly a focus of pushing the vax at all costs.
> This has already happened in Australia, with that one politician stepping down because she had received money from the pharma companies.
As an Australian, I'd like to know more about this? If your referring to Gladys Berejiklian (Ex-Premier of NSW) stepping down, that had nothing to do with Big Pharma [1][2].
Politicians maybe corrupt, but our NHS (here in Blighty) most certainly is not.
Here, the NHS doctors keep asking the politicians for more money to combat Covid, and the current government whistles. (Something you will acknowledge regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum.)
Natural immunity has become a party line issues, sadly. The CDC also has done its part in shunning studies that confirm that it is at least as effective (when not more) than vaccine induced immunity, and boasting only those specific that confirm their narrative, be it nonseroconversion cases among PCR positive to controversial study with cherry picked cohorts.
Public health policy is hard, I gather, but disingenuous information (disinformation?) is a red line that public authorities should never pass (eg Iraqi WMD)
> No wonder natural immunity is being suppressed. Having broad and long-lasting antibody and T-cell immunity is bad for profits and continuing this state of affairs.
What's this based on ? Is there some R-value or Mortality ratio at which natural immunity is better ? Besides vaccines are cheap, nowehere expensive enough to put a dent in people's pockets.
Natural immunity isn't being suppressed. We learned from prior viruses that it is generally not a good idea to seek out infection.
You're hearing a lot about covid because it has a massive impact on society. I really don't think you'd say other preventative treatments are a bad thing because people profit from making them?
The US government continues to refuse to recognize naturally acquired immunity as valid. You can lose your job if you've recovered from COVID19 but do not get the vaccine. There's no reasonable excuse for doing this.
BECUASE IT ISN'T VALID
More than a third of COVID-19 infections result in zero protective antibodies
Natural immunity fades faster than vaccine immunity
Natural immunity alone is less than half as effective than natural immunity plus vaccination
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...
Sure, so do both. One reason to limit the high priced ones is that those buyers should be able, with that money, to afford a truly fantastic EV, so there is generally little sensible reason for them to be buying an ICE vehicle given the circumstances.
Model Y seats seven and the post said start with $100k cars. If they can afford a $100k ICE car they can easily afford a Model Y.
Or even two Model Ys, for the same money, because while 2x purchase price is over $100k, the TCO is so much lower than for an ICE car, and it’s really the TCO (total cost of ownership including everything after purchase) that matters if your worry is affordability.
So assuming two parents, it works for people with up to five kids, or if they have two drivers in the family, up to 12 kids. Most families have fewer than 12 children.
Just having 7 seats doesn’t mean that 7 can actually be seated. I would argue that if you had two car seats the third row would be completely in accessible.
Even if you didn’t have two car seats it’s unlikely that any of the kids stuff will fit as well. Kids come with a lot of stuff in general.
I bought my Tahoe for $30k, I looked at Tesla but we couldn’t afford the 100k price tag of the model X.
For people who are in lower or lower middle class total cost of ownership is something that you can’t really take into consideration because it’s easy to flex the amount spent on gas by reducing the driving around and being more efficient with your errands, but you can’t flex your payments.
Lastly while 57k isn’t bad for an electric vehicle, it’s still far from affordable for a large portion of Americans.
Interesting point, sounds like an unserved need that maybe could be a business opportunity for somebody.
Another thing you can’t flex is repairs, which tend to be more frequent for ICE cars.
> I would argue that if you had two car seats the third row would be completely in accessible.
I think you meant to say “I would imagine.”
And as is frequently the case with people underestimating Tesla, you would imagine wrong.
You can put not just two, but THREE car seats in the second row and still access the third row. The second row seats move forward easily and temporarily to enable this.
There are are a number of lower and lower middle class that people with kids do in fact have to take public transit. And if not public at least extended friend, family transit. Even, non electric, there is an SUV premium that only the top 30% of Americans ~can afford.
Over half? I think you've read my post incorrectly.
I preemptively answered this by saying extended friends and family are a top source of transit.
But yes, walking, bus systems, getting rides, for some demographics, ride shares. Cities like Atlanta and Dallas have low economic mobility because you can't get anywhere except by car.
It’s the buses in Dallas that drive around all day with only the driver. If your on the outskirts sometimes there are two empty buses driving together.
Public transport doesn't work if you have to wear a mask to ride it. People on the margins between wanting to drive or get transport will switch to driving because of the inherent discomfort and dehumanization of being forced to wear a mask.
Remove all COVID-era restrictions from schools, workplaces, and transport, and systems will go back to functioning normally.
Sometimes I swear I'm the only person on the planet who doesn't mind wearing a mask. When you say dehumanizing though - what exactly do you mean by that? Genuinely curious.
I'm with you. Wearing a mask seems like not a huge deal (though I should note that folks on the spectrum may find the experience really unpleasant, and we should do what we can to support folks who aren't neurotypical.)
Try different masks, different styles. There's several different patterns for masks and finding the right one for your face helps a lot.
I own a car and use public transportation. Having to wear a mask has never come even close to factoring into which I take. Having to deal with all the traffic and terrible drivers though? That factors in heavily.
Being on the other side of a bus or train from someone, both wearing masks, allows way more of a humanizing connection than being in a completely separate car bubble.
Alright, I grant you, at least half of humanity wouldn't voluntarily wear a mask even to save the lives of their own family, as we've seen time and again. But the purpose of the masks is to save lives, like wearing a seat belt, or not drinking and driving. Sure, most people would rather drink alcohol while driving without a seat belt. But we don't allow it anyway.
That's not dehumanizing. It's the epitome of humanization. It's about civility, compassion, kindness, and overcoming cruel dispositions and rude habits to become or be made more humane.
Nurses have to wear burdensome levels of PPE, and are forced to get vaccinated (despite many of them already getting COVID during the initial outbreak, and their natural immunity providing broader and longer-lasting protection than vaccines).
Go back to complete normal and this shortage will resolve.
My understanding is that disease induced immunity is a bit more unreliable compared to vaccine induced immunity - perhaps antibodies may be generated that target a part of the virus that is not highly conserved or important for infection, so leaving the individual vulnerable to slight variations, whereas vaccines produce highly targeted antibodies. Also, the virus contains components that interfere with the immune response, perhaps degrading the immune memory?
Vaccination after infection does appear to provide excellent protection though.
We are still doing the science on all this of course.
I'd expect the opposite, and from what I understand, this is particularly so for delta. Consistency is an issue though, as natural immunity is more variable in it's response.
This report on an Israeli study seems to imply that natural immunity was superior to the vaccine for protection against delta, though a combination of vaccination and infection provided the best response. This, to me is intuitive.
Note: 1, educated conjecture ahead
It seems intuitive to me that the natural immune response would provide greater protection against variants like delta, stemming from the nature of their targets. The vaccine is highly tuned for a specific target: the spike protein. Conversely, natural immunity performs multiple "training" runs in parallel, targeting a wider variety of antigens. If you'd take a ML perspective, this is somewhat analogous to an overfit model vs a more generalized model.
Note 2: Alas, you still have to get Covid to begin with to get natural immunity, so you probably don't want to go out of your way to get it if you haven't already.
> In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.
That CDC article is likely outdated. In particular, refer to this line in the cited paper:
>Second, the study period for this analysis occurred before the predominance of the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant;
In the Israeli study, they specifically were observing efficacy against the delta variant, which is the dominant (or will be dominant everywhere eventually). This is notable, because Delta, while not fully escaped, has shown some degree of resistance to the current vaccines.
As such, what I think is the most correct interpretation, given the current information (and is in line with my intuition) is that yes, the vaccines provided greater protection against initial strains, but the relatively narrow target means that they provide a less robust response against later divergence as compared to the more robust natural immunity.
Those don't support that conclusion. Rather, they support the conclusion that natural immunity providing broader and longer-lasting protection for survivors than vaccines do for everyone.
I'm glad that you didn't get as sick as my cousin. I know you didn't, because you're typing and she's dead.
Or if you don't like anecdata:
In the country where I live, more people die per hour of covid than the total number who've died from a vaccine. Considering that, what the point of even trying any further comparative analysis?
I’m pro-vax and vaccinated. We are discussing natural immunity vs. vaccine immunity here - not vaccine immunity vs. immunity of those who never got sick from it at all.
Except countries that don't require vaccinations for healthcare workers have exactly the same burnout issues. And the problems also affect workers that are vaccinated. Having to do the job right now is quite enough apparently.
Post-2015 Europe is just not the same. Walkable neighborhoods, open public services, just do not work properly when you introduce millions of dangerous men from culturally incompatible regions.
It should be clear from these border events that migrants are used as geopolitical pawns to weaken Europe. We need to see mass deportation, as well as stricter minimum requirements to gain citizenship (eg. minimum EUR100k in income tax paid, fluency in the language), if Europe can ever hope to recover.
As soon as you add that requirement to coal power plants, they become immediately uneconomic to build or operate. They are already borderline due to the fall in cost of renewables.
With a meagre Carbon Tax of $15/tonne, coal costs double in the US.
There's nothing that can be done to fix coal power apart from just shutting it all down.
Isn't that the whole appeal of our economic system? To root out these inefficiencies?
If it is not economically feasible to run a coal plant if they do not externalize the pollution cost, how is that my problem? And if the demand justifies it, the cost for coal-generated electricity will go up.
It's a matter of priorities and resource allocation.
Why do we allow coal operators to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else?
The negative externalities are too many degrees of separation and to many years away from any immediately obvious perception of harm.
"Officer, these men are stealing my lawn, a few blades of grass a day as they walk by!" This doesn't engender a threat response until there's visible damage, and even then the solution is likely to involve signs and warnings, since the responsibility for total damage is so widely distributed. We need a fence around the climate lawn, and we can't leave the gate open for some people and not others, if you catch my drift.
We're beginning to see global acknowledgment of the problems and gradual progress towards reducing emissions. Once technology can accurately measure the cost of the negative externalities, they can be priced in. If the cost is on an exponential trend, where each ton of co2 is now seen to cost the operator an additional .0000001 cents, but 100 years later might cost millions, with regards to preventable damage, markets currently are accurately pricing in the costs. They're just not equipped to assess global climate and long term planning as relevant. That has to come from legislating sane and scientific and fair rules.
There's nothing inherently wrong with burning coal if there's a globally recognized system of accountability. Since there's not likely to ever be such a hegemony, you get what we have now - slow, frustratingly bureaucratic incremental progress, and therefore the need for mitigation as well as sustainable energy tech.
The EU has much higher pricing of CO2 (currently at 60 eur / tonne [0]) and yet Germany was using more coal power than expected, forced by the fact that there was a scarcity of wind. [1]
Of course, that caused the prices of electricity for households to jump up. [2]
Carbon Tracker calculates that the majority of coal plants in Europe are already cost negative.[1] They live off uncompetitive tariffs and subsidies. Germany's reverse auction for coal plants over the last year ended up accepting a lot of very low bids, as coal owners were desperate to get out from under stranded assets. Even they were widely criticized as over-priced given the state of the industry.
If you're considering whether coal plants would exist at all, you need to compare to the price of things like batteries. (Unless we make a ton of nuclear.)
It would be great to do sane carbon policy, but politics is the limiting factor at the moment. Carbon capture is one of the few universally popular solutions.
It could also be used in home ventilation systems. Its much easier to remove CO2 from the inside air than to rotate out the entire air envelope, for a chemical that makes up a few hundred parts per million.
Moderna up 24% in the last 5 days: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MRNA:NASDAQ?window=5D
New variants are great for business!