How Omicron upended what we thought we knew about natural immunity

[AllyCat]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-omicron-upended-what-we-thought-we-knew-about-natural-immunity/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Between Dec. 1 and Jan. 17, at least 18 million Americans contracted COVID. Data suggests that the vast majority of those cases were in unvaccinated people, but plenty of people who got their primary series of the vaccine also caught the immunity-evading omicron variant. By the time this wave is over, American bodies will know this virus like never before. But will the survivors gain anything from having had the disease? After all, there will be more variants in the future. Could the hard-earned immunity we’ve gained from omicron help fight them off? Could this wave be the last?

On Monday, White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci said it’s too soon to answer these questions. Scientists we spoke to agreed. But they also said the reason these questions were so difficult to answer was because of an issue that hasn’t always gotten much attention in the public sphere: the immunity provided by a COVID infection itself. Scientists have learned a lot about this “natural immunity” since the pandemic began. But omicron has upended many of those expectations, and the more we learn about this variant, the less clear it is what we should expect for the future of the virus and our immunity to it.

Scientists have been studying infection-induced immunity since COVID first emerged. In fact, it was the only kind of immunity anyone could really study at that point, said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medical College. And while there are now many more studies on vaccine-induced immunity thanks to clinical trials and easily trackable vaccinated populations like medical staff, there’s a lot that can be said about natural immunity, pre-omicron, with a reasonable amount of certainty.

One important takeaway from all that pre-omicron research: Infection-induced immunity and vaccine-induced immunity are pretty similar. On the whole, studies found that the efficacy of infection-induced immunity was about the same as what you’d get from a two-dose mRNA vaccine, and sometimes higher. For example, research from the U.K., in which a few hundred thousand participants were followed in a large-scale longitudinal survey, found that prior to May 16, having had two doses of the vaccine (regardless of the type) reduced the risk of testing positive by 79 percent, while being unvaccinated and having had a previous infection reduced the risk by 65 percent. After the delta variant became dominant,1 vaccination became less effective, reducing the risk by 67 percent, while a previous infection reduced the risk by 71 percent.
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I know people vaccinated AND unvaccinated that have caught Covid more than once. Arming ourselves with the best we can to prevent this disease makes sense.

[empedocles]

1. ty

[Hugin]

2. Everyone I personally know who has caught the Omicron variant was fully vaxxed based on the most...

Last edited Tue Jan 25, 2022, 06:07 PM - Edit history (1)

current CDC definition. 2&1.

Granted, for the most part their symptoms haven't been life threatening.

[AllyCat]

3. The unvaxxed folks I know missed 2-4 weeks of work

The vaxxed about 3-5 days.