Covid and covid vaccine

[Bumpsadaisie]

Can anyone help me think about this please?

I will set out what I understand to be settled science but please correct me if I am wrong.

If you are seriously ill "with covid" what is actually happening is that you are having a catastrophic problem with your immune system going into over drive to fight the virus such that it is attacking too many of your cells in your vital organs. It's the unregulated and escalating immune response which is over reactive and dangerous.

How your immune response reacts is quite individual although there are patterns - older people and obese people much more vulnerable on a population level. Though that is not to say that a healthy 30 year old could not have the same difficulties. This is presumably because older and obese people have more poorly regulated or less effective immune systems than younger people.

When you have a covid vaccine, a small amount of covid virus is put into your body, stimulating your immune response in a small way. This allows you to make T cells and B cells which then mean that, when you pick up the virus proper,your body has a massive head start and already knows how to defeat the virus.

A virus multiplies and invades your cells very rapidly so if your body detects and knows it from the off you are in a good position to head it off before it can take too much of a hold.

A vaccine is like a mini-mini version of a full on covid infection. I am sure it's true that people have experienced side effects to the vaccine and presumably this is due to how their immune systems respond.

Obviously that is not great.

But surely if those people were to have not have had the vaccine - and instead waited for full on natural covid infection in an unprepared body - the immune systems response would be that much more extreme and potentially ill-making? That is, if they reacted that way to the tiny amount of virus in the vaccine, how much worse would the react to the full on infection?

Or to put it another way why do people think of it as vaccine versus natural infection?

The two are the same thing surely, just the natural infection involves a lot more viruses?!

So if someone has side effects from a vaccine why do people say "oh the vaccine is dangerous" rather than "goodness, thank god I got the vaccine and not the full monty as surely I would have been much worse!"?

I am not a scientist so really happy for someone to explain it to me.

I suppose I am thinking of Georgia Clarke who did get myocarditis from Pfizer but is saying she would def have the vaccine again as her response to a natural covid infection would have been much worse?

The mechanisms involved in a natural infection and mRNA vaccination are not the same (or even close). There are differences beyond the amount of virus/viral RNA present. For this reason you couldn't assume that someone who had severe side effects from the vaccine would have the same outcome if they had encountered the virus instead.

@Coldpressed

The mechanisms involved in a natural infection and mRNA vaccination are not the same (or even close). There are differences beyond the amount of virus/viral RNA present. For this reason you couldn't assume that someone who had severe side effects from the vaccine would have the same outcome if they had encountered the virus instead.

I am interested into why you specifically think the mechanism of mRNA vaccination inducing an immune response is "not even close" to that of SARS-COV-2 infection?

i would agree with your thinking, as I have an auto-immune disease I had to weigh up potential flare up after the vaccine versus potential flare up after covid and for me having the vaccine(pfizer) was a far far better choice and I've had no significant adverse effects from it. My family member (same auto-immune condition)has had a different experience in that they did had adverse reaction to the jab (AZ) hence only had 1 jab and now too frightened to have any more . The difficulty is when you live with a chronic illness where you have to deal with flare ups it can be psychologically difficult to choose to do something ie. a vaccine that you fear may put you into a flare. We are a social species and if you know someone who a. had a bad response to a vaccine or b. had a bad response to Covid this may well sway your decision! Once you've had covid the choice can perhaps be weighted differently as you then know whether or not covid would be worse for you...the vast majority would have been advised to choose vaccine over covid whilst we were in the midst of the pandemic but the risk/benefit ratios may change for an individual as the virus becomes endemic.

The vaccines aren't a dose of virus, they are a means of getting your cells to make antibodies to the spike protein, so that when you come across the virus you are primed & ready to go. In theory I would have thought that a natural
infection would be better as it would be multivalent (ie not just against the spike protein) but in practice some people don't seem to make antibodies to a natural infection.
The fact that you have antibodies to the spike protein means that you are less likely to get infected in the first place (less so for omicron) and if you do you already have your T & B cells primed so there is a more controlled response & you don't get a cytokine storm which is what causes the problems.
To repeat: there is no virus in the vaccines.

In theory I would have thought that a natural
infection would be better as it would be multivalent

Well yes, but that natural infection may have caused catastrophic organ damage. So although in theory you may be pretty much immune going forward (although the evidence suggests otherwise at least for some), that initial infection may be an extremely high price to pay.

Absolutely WiseUpJanetWeiss

FWIW, I am Covid vaccine free, and had covid in March 2020.

It wasn't amazing but it also wasn't awful. I could function it felt like a pretty bad cold.

The human body is amazing on its own.

FWIW, I also had COVID-19 in March 2020. I was 44 years old at the time, no health issues, healthy BMI. I was pretty laid-back about it and I've never been an anxious person generally.

It was the worst illness I have ever had - the breathlessness, exhaustion and heart palpitations were awful, the constant low-grade fever was miserable. I forced myself to eat normally and was in quarantine at home, and still I lost a stone in weight in the space of a week. I went downhill between days 7-11, diarrhoea the colour of turmeric on day 8 and on day 12 there was blood in my phlegm.

I got jabs 1, 2 and 3 on the first day I was allowed to do so and I would happily get a booster every 6 months rather than go through that shit again. You roll the dice when you catch a novel virus and there's no guarantee it'll be milder next time, so no, I will not be relying on my immune system alone if I can get free, safe and highly effective help.

"If you are seriously ill "with covid" what is actually happening is that you are having a catastrophic problem with your immune system going into over drive to fight the virus such that it is attacking too many of your cells in your vital organs. It's the unregulated and escalating immune response which is over reactive and dangerous."

Is that true though?
It can be the reason why someone is seriously ill.

But as I understand it the damage the virus itself does to your lungs can cause serious illness. This impedes your lungs ability to absorb sufficient oxygen, which in extreme cases causes your organs to become starved of oxygen, which causes damage to your body and even death.

Likewise when you lose your sense of smell, that is not your immune system attacking your olfactory system, it's the virus itself doing the damage.

Happy to be corrected though.

But if the serious illness was caused by the immune system overreacting, I would expect to see higher mortality in the young, healthy and well-rested. Whereas all thought he pandemic the worst affected groups have been those with weakened immune systems (the elderly and immune compromised).

I noticed on the BBC news recently that when they give you the death statistics for the last 24 hours, they then add on, but not every death was necessarily covid related.
Or words to that effect.

Is this the media now trying to show that actually the death relates are quite low to prevent any future restrictions?

Before this, they just said the

death statistics and made out that people died of covid.

Sorry my post above is a bit garbled and typo ridden.
I would be interested to know though:
Is it true that the deaths and long term affects of Covid are due to a cytokine storm? Ie, the immune systems response to Covid rather than the virus itself

I was fairly sure that this WASN'T the case, and that the majority of deaths and serious illness were caused by the virus itself rather than the immune system's response.

I remember reading about cytokine storms being a big issue for a previous pandemic (Spanish flu?). But did not think this was the case for Covid.