<story><title>What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00214-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dopylitty</author><text>This is a really good article on the immune system.&lt;p&gt;One thing I can&amp;#x27;t help but notice though is that it only barely skirts the fact that essentially no viral vaccine prevents infection, with the possible exception of the HPV vaccine.&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of the vaccines we currently use allow infection but give the body the ability to quickly respond to and end the infection before it leads to severe disease (eg paralysis in Polio or B-cell destruction in Measles). For slowly developing viruses you may see no symptoms at all because the body is able to clear the infection but for viruses like flu and Sars-CoV-2 that attack the respiratory system it&amp;#x27;s much more difficult to prevent symptomatic disease.&lt;p&gt;Somehow there&amp;#x27;s this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.&lt;p&gt;The benefit of the vaccines is that they greatly reduce severe disease, almost eliminate death, and shorten the amount of time the virus has to reproduce so transmission and variant generation are also reduced.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lamontcg</author><text>&amp;gt;  This is a really good article on the immune system.&lt;p&gt;I still don&amp;#x27;t particularly like it that much.&lt;p&gt;None of this should be all that new.&lt;p&gt;There were plenty of knowledgeable people saying all along that sterilizing nutralizing immunity in the mucosa was unlikely to be achievable for a vaccine against a respiratory virus that most commonly had no viremic phase, particularly as a shot given in the arm.&lt;p&gt;They were also saying that T-cells were the important thing to prevent disease and death and we shouldn&amp;#x27;t be focusing on preventing infection.&lt;p&gt;Some other people who debated or disagreed with that perspective are now suddenly learning novel new things about the immune system.  There&amp;#x27;s a good chunk of experts out there that were saying this all along though (if you were listening to them and not the headlines and blogs and twitter).</text></comment>
<story><title>What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00214-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dopylitty</author><text>This is a really good article on the immune system.&lt;p&gt;One thing I can&amp;#x27;t help but notice though is that it only barely skirts the fact that essentially no viral vaccine prevents infection, with the possible exception of the HPV vaccine.&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of the vaccines we currently use allow infection but give the body the ability to quickly respond to and end the infection before it leads to severe disease (eg paralysis in Polio or B-cell destruction in Measles). For slowly developing viruses you may see no symptoms at all because the body is able to clear the infection but for viruses like flu and Sars-CoV-2 that attack the respiratory system it&amp;#x27;s much more difficult to prevent symptomatic disease.&lt;p&gt;Somehow there&amp;#x27;s this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.&lt;p&gt;The benefit of the vaccines is that they greatly reduce severe disease, almost eliminate death, and shorten the amount of time the virus has to reproduce so transmission and variant generation are also reduced.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cloutchaser</author><text>I think we should thank whatever god that so far it seems we didn&amp;#x27;t end up with a Marek&amp;#x27;s disease type situation. I don&amp;#x27;t know how much of a guarantee there was about this with covid, but if the vaccine would have promoted a much more aggressive virus we could have ended up in a situation where any unvaccinated human will basically die (this happens in chickens, see: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Marek%27s_disease&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Marek%27s_disease&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;I sincerely hope the people who devised this vaccine know what they are doing. As far as I know (according to a Katalin Kariko inteview), the Sars-Cov-2 spike protein can&amp;#x27;t mutate too much without limiting it&amp;#x27;s effectiveness, so therefore this vaccine should theoretically work in the future.&lt;p&gt;But that Marek&amp;#x27;s disease issue is very very scary to me.</text></comment>