Natural Immunity

Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s former chief medical adviser and one of the country’s top infectious disease experts, on Sunday said there’s “no doubt” the U.S. is experiencing a rise in the spread of COVID-19, but predicted the country is unlikely to be overwhelmed by the virus this coming winter.

In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Fauci said while he is monitoring the uptick in cases, he is so far not overly worried.

Vaccination and infection both provide protective immunity to COVID-19, particularly against severe disease. But gaining immunity through infection is far riskier than vaccination. Posts citing a new Lancet study omit that important context and also misleadingly claim the study shows immunity after infection is superior to vaccination immunity. A co-author of the study told us there was “insufficient data to definitively state” immunity from infection is superior.

How effective are the vaccines?

Bhasha Mewar has had it with doctors. Over the past two years, Mewar has spent nearly all of her life savings seeing heart and respiratory specialists, haematologists, urologists, dermatologists and more, in a desperate bid to tame her long-COVID symptoms. She has taken a slew of drugs: beta blockers to calm her racing heart, steroid inhalers to ease her laboured breathing and an antimalarial drug prescribed to her for reasons she never fully understood.

There are three different types of long Covid and each has its own set of symptoms, according to researchers.

Experts from King’s College London examined 1,459 people living with long Covid - defined by the study authors as suffering symptoms for at least 84 days after infection - and found there appeared to be three “subtypes” of the condition.

A pre-print of the study, published on medRxiv, revealed people with long Covid appeared to be split into three main groups, including:

When Carrie Anna McGinn woke up alone in her hotel room on Christmas morning in 2020, she thought she was experiencing the worst of her COVID symptoms. She struggled against coughing, cognitive dysfunction, pain, and ​postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

She was isolated away from her family but expected to be back to normal in time for the New Year’s Eve celebrations. But when January came, many of her symptoms never went away, she told Macleans Magazine.

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel on Wednesday said the end of the coronavirus pandemic could be on the horizon.

“I think that is a reasonable scenario,” he told CNBC when asked whether he thought the pandemic was winding down. “There’s an 80% chance that as omicron evolves or SarsCov-2 virus evolves, we are going to see less and less virulent viruses.”

Moderna along with Pfizer pioneered the use of mRNA vaccines against the novel coronavirus, greatly reducing the severity of infection in those who got the jab.

The omicron wave that assaulted the United States this winter also bolstered its defenses, leaving enough protection against the coronavirus that future spikes will likely require much less — if any — dramatic disruption to society.

Millions of individual Americans’ immune systems now recognize the virus and are primed to fight it off if they encounter omicron, or even another variant.

The early 1990s were in many ways the most terrible of those first years of the AIDS epidemic in America. Research on the disease was in high gear, but drug after drug failed to stop H.I.V. Funerals for friends and family in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s continued unabated, and many of us at risk for getting sick had given up hope of a normal life. My friends and I, most of us just a few years out of college, lived in the moment because we weren’t sure of how much time we had left.

Recent viral social media posts from popular right-wing figures and websites have suggested that a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study determined previous coronavirus infections offered greater protection against coronavirus than vaccination.

Among all the ways that COVID-19 affects our lives, the pandemic confronts us with a profound moral dilemma:

How should we react to the deaths of the unvaccinated?

On the one hand, a hallmark of civilized thought is the sense that every life is precious.

On the other, those who have deliberately flouted sober medical advice by refusing a vaccine known to reduce the risk of serious disease from the virus, including the risk to others, and end up in the hospital or the grave can be viewed as receiving their just deserts.