At least some essential things should have been clear in people’s minds after nearly two years of the pandemic, but our collective inability to learn the basics of the basics never ceases to amaze me. One of the stupidest examples is the fact that there are still people dreaming of “natural immunity” as a magic passport to get out of the limbo of the coronavirus. Isn’t it better for everyone to “get it soon” the devil of the disease? Wouldn’t it be the same protection as the vaccine, or even better?
No, it wouldn’t. The cavalcade that now occupies the Palácio do Planalto can keep repeating this fallacy as much as it wants (which, unfortunately, it has done several times over the last few years), but that won’t turn the bullshit into fact.
I return to the comparison with vaccines, a topic that continues to be very important, but I ask the reader to take a step back with me before that. It turns out that those who rely on natural immunity are acting on a false premise about the kind of microscopic enemy that causes Covid-19.
The interactions between the causes of diseases and the defense system of our organism are of a baroque complexity, and there is still a long way to go to fully understand them, but an indisputable aspect of them is that the duration of immunity obtained by those who recover from the attack of a virus varies a lot. In general, this variability has to do with the type of attacker.
We know that certain viruses can generate lifelong immunity in those who survive them. This is the case of the cause of measles — a scourge that, incidentally, has returned to Brazil because of our carelessness with vaccination. In a simplification for didactic purposes, we will call viruses of this type “type 1”.
But everyone should be familiar with the multiform influenza virus by now. Nobody catches the flu once in their lives and stays immune for decades to come. People get sick again with the flu all the time, maybe even dozens of times from early childhood to old age. In part, this is because there is a huge variety of strains (subgroups) of the so-called influenza virus, which have great potential to recombine parts of their genetic material and, thus, kick the ball between the legs of our immune system. Now, let’s call viruses like the flu “type 2.”
Well, Sars-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, is not a type 1 virus. It is very clear that it is a type 2 virus. Luckily for all of us, its genetic reconfiguration mechanisms are far from being so versatile as those of influenza viruses, but still robust enough to allow multiple reinfections over a lifetime. There’s nothing surprising about that, because that’s exactly how its relatives who are our old acquaintances, the coronaviruses that cause forms of the common cold, operate. How many colds has the kind reader caught in his life?
So it is lunatic talk to say that the “corona” omicron version is a “vaccine strain”. Whoever caught Sars-CoV-2 “version 1.0” could very well have reinfected themselves with the delta variant in 2021 and still have won another lambuja re-infection with the ômicron in 2022.
And the vaccines? They were designed to generate a standardized, robust and focused response from the body’s defense system, without the subterfuge that the virus uses in a natural infection. We already know that they are not perfect, and the need to update them with new versions of the virus or its genetic material is looming – as is the case with the flu vaccine. But they are much, much better than the alternative. Get vaccinated. Vaccinate your children.
Source: Folha
