Sorry, a Coronavirus Infection Might Not Be Enough to Protect You

[douglas9]

Immune cells can learn the vagaries of a particular infectious disease in two main ways. The first is bona fide infection, and it’s a lot like being schooled in a war zone, where any lesson in protection might come at a terrible cost. Vaccines, by contrast, safely introduce immune cells to only the harmless mimic of a microbe, the immunological equivalent of training guards to recognize invaders before they ever show their face. The first option might be more instructive and immersive—it is, after all, the real thing. But the second has a major advantage: It provides crucial intel in the absence of risk.

Some pathogens aren’t memorable to the body, no matter the form in which they’re introduced. But with SARS-CoV-2, we’ve been lucky: Both inoculation and infection can marshal stellar protection. Past tussles with the virus, in fact, seem so immunologically instructive that in many places, including several nations in the European Union, Israel, and the United Kingdom, they can grant access to restaurants, bars, and travel hubs galore, just as full vaccination does.

In the United States, conversely, only fully vaccinated Americans can wield the social currency that immunity affords. The policy has repeatedly come into heated contention, especially as the country barrels forward with plans for boosters and vaccination mandates. No one, it seems, can agree on the immunological exchange rate—whether a past infection can sub in for one inoculation or two inoculations, or more, or none at all—or just how much immunity counts as “enough.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/infection-immunity-covid-19-vaccines/620099/

[Johnny2X2X]

1. Inflamation

The body can fight off Covid without antibodies, it can do it through things like fever and inflamation. You can fight off Covid and have no antibodies against Covid. Then the 2nd time you get Coivd may be much worse and you can die. The vaccine guarantees some antibodies against Covid and the ability to produce them.

[Hugin]

2. Yeah.

I've been stressing this with several people I know who earlier had COVID. Especially, if it was the so-called asymptomatic case.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. From the OP article link

Even among the nation’s top health officials, a potential shift in the social status of the once-infected remains “under active discussion,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told me. For now, though, he reiterated, “it still is the policy that if you’ve been infected and recovered, that you should get vaccinated.” And in the United States, which is awash in supplies of shots, some version of that policy is likely to stick. Infections and vaccinations, down to a molecular level, are “fundamentally different” experiences, Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, told me. Surviving a rendezvous with SARS-CoV-2 might mean gaining some protection, but it’s no guarantee.

What the experts do converge on is this: Opting for an infection over vaccination is never the right move. An unprotected rendezvous with SARS-CoV-2 ultimately amounts to taking a double gamble—that the virus won’t ravage the body with debilitating disease or death, and that it will eventually be purged, leaving only immune protection behind. Questions linger, too, about how long such safeguards might last, and how they stack up against the carefully constructed armor of inoculation. Vaccines eliminate the guesswork—a fail-safe we’ll need to keep relying on as the coronavirus persists in the human population, threatening to invade our bodies again, and again, and again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/infection-immunity-covid-19-vaccines/620099/

[ShazzieB]

5. "Vaccines eliminate the guesswork."

"Vaccines eliminate the guesswork—a fail-safe we’ll need to keep relying on as the coronavirus persists in the human population, threatening to invade our bodies again, and again, and again."

That sentence right there is golden!

[BumRushDaShow]

6. Yeah I'm afraid the "again and again and again" is the scary part

if you survive the first time, let alone the 2nd or 3rd if we can't get the transmission rates down.