To Think People Don't Know Covid Harms The Immune System

[Sunshineguy]

Many people are blaming the unusually severe winter bugs on so-called 'immunity debt', the false idea a prolonged period of health makes one more susceptible to infections. Two countries disprove this theory. Sweden was largely open and had a large wave of RSV hospitalizations in 2021 and an even larger one this year. Japan was largely closed, and now it's opened up only had a tiny number of people hospitalized for RSV.

The WHO is warning Covid-19 causes immune dysfunction.

twitter.com/Sandyboots2020/status/1608402400817336322?t=Jj_Kz6Bxhk04sP_osKOGEg&s=19

And evidence is amassing of the range of immune damage done by the virus:

twitter.com/jeffgilchrist/status/1605958004163084292?t=WMTYOfFYmveyzE9aVt9Ppg&s=19

If the immunity debt isn't repaid in 2023, and people keep experiencing more sickness than usual, will we all accept this SARS virus will never be a common cold?

I had shingles after the Moderna jab

@User176489 correlation causation and all that

Not likely. It was probably stress or another infection.

Ops who post and never return lose any credibility, as far as I am concerned.

1. There’s a lot of misunderstanding on this thread about what ‘immunity debt’ means. It doesn’t refer to an individual’s immunity status but a society’s. A person does not have an immune debt. A community does. It means that because fewer people have had any given virus in the preceding 12-24 months there will be a lower percentage of people with immunity to that virus and therefore a higher percentage who are susceptible. This means the virus is more likely to circulate widely. In the case of RSV and flu this results in potentially quite substantial hospitalisation as some groups are vulnerable.
2. RSV is an important example of a virus where there actually are implications for individual as well as community immunity. In normal years when RSV has circulated at typical levels we would expect newborns to have some level of immunity acquired via the mother when she was exposed to RSV during her pregnancy. This did not happen during the lockdown years and the resulting larger numbers of babies with zero immunity to RSV, coinciding with high circulating levels because of immunity debt as described above, has likely contributed to big bumps in paediatric admissions for RSV bronchiolitis.
3. The statistics support the immunity debt theory, not the covid-induced immune deficiency theory. In New Zealand (massive lockdowns, little covid) RSV infections have ballooned since opening up. And in the case of immune deficiency we’d expect to see lots of chronic and opportunistic infections rather than lots of seasonal viruses with mostly normal patterns of recovery. That’s not what’s happening.

Yes I don’t see the point in doing it.

I do wonder how carefree and dont give a damn some of you will be in a few decades time, though.

You know more than the World Health Organisation? Astounding.

It's interesting and no I didn't know. Thank you for posting

It's just nice to have stuff in Active that I want to see.

Well I would like to see a broad range of stuff in active. Even stuff that doesn't personally interest me. Not censored. It really makes no sense to even have an AIBU section under your argument, as practically all of the threads should be in the 'relationship' section then? You can categorise everything.

I also hide a lot of threads, all the baby ones for example as mine hasn't been a baby for many years. It's not censoring, it's just keeping stuff out of active that I am not interested in.

Hide Topic and Hide Thread are two of the most useful functions on MN.

Oh great. I already have a useless immune system - now it's going to be even more useless?

Mother Nature doesn’t owe you an immune system. Guidelines, protocols and preachin’ isn’t going to stop you dying. Be that aged 95, doubly incontinent and unable to recognise your children - or wiped out 6 weeks from now by a pandemic which means business.

It’s really rather a peculiar arrogance of the human race that we think we can hold back the tide.

Probably not.

Here's a comprehensive thread on Twitter debunking a lot of the "coVId iS aIRbouRnE AiDs" shite that keeps getting thrown around. The thread includes links to studies and demonstrates how much has been misinterpreted:

twitter.com/penguinone/status/1602233011533414401

Most of this has come from a handful of commentators who still think we should be in an extreme lockdown.

Worth pointing out that this is the first time any virus has been studied in this much detail. So we're learning a lot of new stuff about how the immune system functions etc.

Part of the problem is that we've become so much more aware of viruses in general, and so when people talk about the "worst cold ever" the idea catches on and gets spread around social media etc. I remember my worst cold ever, and it was in September 2014 when I ended up on antibiotics for a secondary infection.

Also "immune debt" isn't some made up term, but it's been misinterpreted by some who think it refers to the idea that the immune system is a muscle that needs working out. That is not what public health are talking about. They are referring to the phenomenon that there is a larger than normal population susceptible to viruses because they haven't caught it previously. That is what is overwhelming the NHS.

I also find it weird that these same people are arguing for measures to contain Covid whilst simultaneously arguing that these measures did not contain other viruses and therefore there is no "immunity debt".

Oh and finally, if Covid really did damage the immune system, we would be seeing a lot more diseases being spread around than the usual winter respiratory illnesses.

Many pathogens dampen the immune system for a while after the initial infection.

Covid does seem particularly good at it, with published evidence showing that it can last for 6 months or more (obviously not everyone will get the same degree of dysregulation, or for the same duration, but it happens, and can be enduring - it's not linked to severity of initial infection, seen also following mild and moderate infections, though more common with severe)

We are seeing more cases of diseases that are pretty effectively prevented by wearing masks - that's why it's only some diseases that have particularly high numbers this winter virus season. The greater numbers are because we are (perhaps) seeing two years worth of susceptible cohort rather than one.

But also remember that DC were back in school over 18 months ago, and some parts of the population were never in lockdown. Also that this phenomenon did not occur when it might reasonable have been expected - the first winter virus season after ending of all restriction, and when the diseases had circulated (in the case of RSV at high levels) in the southern hemisphere, in their winter preceding ours.

But it does not account for why people are becoming more ill with these diseases (strep A and RSV, it's harder to call with flu as that's more variable, but it does seem to be making enough people very ill to be causing problems with number requiring hospitalisation even this early int he season)

Whereas temporary dysregulation of the immune system, especially in regards to diseases which would normally be tackled by the parts shown to be affected by covid (so not all diseases) would explain why a higher proportion are getting the more severe form of the diseases.

TLDR: yes, previous infection with covid could well be a factor.

To be fair, most people don't seem to know or want to know any of the facts about this virus and its documented effects, and if you mention them they shriek Stop scaremongering!

Well it's about long Covid and we know already there are problems with it. I've never had Covid but been vaccinated 3 times and still had 3 colds and a tummy bug and the last few months

I clicked on the link because the thread title implied to me that everyone with covid now had a damaged immune system - but then it seemed to be only talking about people with long covid so hugely misleading IMO.

I don't personally know anyone with long covid, I know someone (50+) who got covid before vaccinations were around and had to give everything up as even when they went home from hospital they were on oxygen and couldn't walk. It's taken a couple of years but they now apparently are hugely improved, off the oxygen and able to get around thankfully.

I think the best thing to do is keep up with vaccinations and keep healthy.

Well according to Vernon Coleman I'm going to spontaneously combust or something this month because it's 2 years since my first jab. 🙄

What do you mean, I do wonder how carefree and dont give a damn some of you will be in a few decades time, though ? I'll (god willing) be in my late 80s, but what exactly are you implying with that cryptic comment?

Why did OP use RSV examples to then make conclusions about SARS-CoV-2 ?

OP not returned? Wondering if this is one of those troll threads.
There is other evidence suggesting the Covid vaccine damages the body - maybe that’s why we have ‘rising cases’ of every virus / bacteria / old time diseases (scarlet fever etc)?
I should put context that a very close friend died less than 2 weeks after his 2nd vaccination (from Covid)

What evidence are you talking about? Which vaccine are you referring to? Pfizer? Astra Zeneca? Can you cite a single published paper in a reputable journal to support this statement? Because if not you are scaremongering — much like most of this thread which (as PP have said) implies in its OP that immune damage from COVID is widespread and long lasting whilst the supporting link discusses only long covid. And whilst LC is an important public health issue it is a) less likely to occur after vaccination, and b) extremely various in severity and persistence, and probably comparable with other forms of post viral fatigue (which, until covid came along, most people didn’t care about and many didn’t actually believe in).

This basically. They were not all just going about their business as normal were they?

For the Sweden argument to stand you’d have to prove that whilst the rest of the world wasn’t having much flu (and RSV etc) throughout the pandemic they were. I’m sure their levels of flu and other respiratory illnesses were also low. They had restrictions too.

My issue with the Covid - immune system argument is that it’s not very nuanced. Does it affect every single persons immune system or just some? Surely we have seen this with other viruses- your body is tired from fighting off an illness leaving you susceptible to others - this is not new information.

See glandular fever and teenagers..

Also, Covid hasn’t been round long enough to make any long term conclusions about impact on immune systems. Maybe some
people’s are temporarily compromised- but that surely must vary between people. And severity of Covid.

I’m not going to source my info from Twitter and then quote it here. I’ll wait for some more peer reviewed research to be done on this before reaching any conclusions.

Personally, I’ve had Covid twice, each time milder than the first (tripe vaccinated). I’m pleased that this is not a novel virus to me any more, that’s how we build up immunity to viruses.

I’m not worried about my immune system- it seems robust. That’s the best we can all do - be healthy and get on with our lives now.

We have to fight misinformation because this won’t be the last pandemic.

we should also learn from East Asian countries that could control it without massive lockdowns.

imagine if we had done the same, we would not have this issue at hand.

unfotunately Covid could not be controlled without western countries joining in.

in UK we had the worst combination, we locked down the longest but when the Covid numbers were down we didn’t do the proper test and trace.

vaccine only policy was never going to work we were warned about immunity evasive variants well in advance.

what we have to do now is minimise the number of times we catch Covid but we are not encouraged to do that either.