<story><title>Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-no-infection-parties</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tacomonstrous</author><text>&amp;gt;the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher&lt;p&gt;This sounds convincing, but then in the next graf:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;For instance, the higher hospitalization rate in the 32,000-person analysis was based on just eight hospitalizations in a vaccinated group and one in a previously infected group. And the 13-fold increased risk of infection in the same analysis was based on just 238 infections in the vaccinated population, less than 1.5% of the more than 16,000 people, versus 19 reinfections among a similar number of people who once had SARS-CoV-2.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pacbard</author><text>&amp;gt;the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher&lt;p&gt;The denominator in those odds ratios seem to fishy to me. Comparing people who were previously infected with COVID and vaccine recipients does some weird conditioning on getting COVID, so it should hide risks of developing symptomatic COVID and hospitalization for people who got COVID previously. It seems to me that the risks should be &amp;quot;cumulative&amp;quot; for people who were previously infected (i.e., the denominator should include symptomatic infections and hospitalizations for previous COVID variants and not just delta) rather than &amp;quot;zeroing&amp;quot; those risks for this group and just focus on delta re-infection. The decision to only focus on delta infections will bias up the OR estimates for vaccine (in)effectiveness, so we should read the results of this paper as the possible upper bound of the ORs.&lt;p&gt;Also, the study compares the risk of delta infection, meaning that people cannot really just say &amp;quot;I won&amp;#x27;t get vaccinated because natural immunity is better&amp;quot; as the variants that provided that natural immunity are not &amp;quot;dominant&amp;quot; anymore, meaning that the opportunity to acquire natural immunity against delta is probably close to zero at this time.&lt;p&gt;Also also, isn&amp;#x27;t it something that is known that natural immunity is better than vaccine-acquired immunity? The trade-off is that natural immunity has the &amp;quot;side effect&amp;quot; of actually having to fight off and survive the illness?</text></comment>
<story><title>Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-no-infection-parties</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tacomonstrous</author><text>&amp;gt;the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher&lt;p&gt;This sounds convincing, but then in the next graf:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;For instance, the higher hospitalization rate in the 32,000-person analysis was based on just eight hospitalizations in a vaccinated group and one in a previously infected group. And the 13-fold increased risk of infection in the same analysis was based on just 238 infections in the vaccinated population, less than 1.5% of the more than 16,000 people, versus 19 reinfections among a similar number of people who once had SARS-CoV-2.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kiba</author><text>To develop natural immunity, you would need to get infected with the virus, no? That&amp;#x27;s considerably more risky than getting the vaccine.&lt;p&gt;If you do get infected with the virus after vaccination, wouldn&amp;#x27;t you also develop natural immunity?</text></comment>