What am I forgetting? Surely you don’t mean Covid.
You may be an anti-vaxxer now, or maybe just anti-vaxxer adjacent /red
We need trustworthy institutions of all kinds - medical, legal, public health, research, university, press, political, governance, regulatory, military, intelligence services, etc. I don’t think we have them.
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There are some medical people who are uncomfortable seeing brown paper lunch sacks. Bad memories.
“Just tell me a truth I already believe!!”
Yes, a few.
There are about 30 trillion cells in a human body
The human cell count and size distribution - PubMed.
The number of cells typically killed by catching covid is something like 10,000 to 1,000,000.
The total number and mass of SARS-CoV-2 virions - PMC.
That’s from peak exposure of 10^9 to 10^11 virions while infected.
I wasn’t able to find a good estimate of the number of cells “infected” by the mRNA vaccines, but i read a lot about how fragile the stuff is, and how you need to inject it directly into a large muscle because otherwise there may not be enough biological activity. (Muscle cells are apparently mRNA-friendly.)
So yes, the cells that are destroyed are “a few” on the scale of cells. (Which get destroyed and replaced all the time.) And the number of cells destroyed by an infection are “a few”, too, so long as your immune system works. And if it doesn’t, well, then covid destroys more than just a few of your cells. Sadly, both my mother and my uncle suffered rapid-onset severe dementia when they caught covid, because the virus got into their brain and ran amuck.
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Of course. I suspect you are right that your exposure reprimed your immune system, and you wouldn’t get any particular benefit from vaccination right now.
And the “care for others” argument for vaccination was stronger before the virus mutated away from the initial vaccine. Yes, vaccination still reduces the length and severity of a bout of covid, meaning you are less contagious overall. But it’s not anything like the same magnitude as at the start of the pandemic. And also, now that most of us have prior exposure (via some combination of vaccines and infections), our immune system reacts faster to an infection, so we feel sick faster (a lot of the initial “i feel crummy” when you get sick is actually a side effect of immune activity) and there’s much less presymptomatic exposure than there used to be. Stay away from vulnerable people if you feel ill, and wear a mask if you need to go out when you are sick, and you are doing your part to help keep other people safe.
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I do kinda get how the hostility and expectations push people that way. I think i have also been fairly consistent going back to 2021 with the idea that someone who has had covid previously should be considered to have the same immunity as a vaccinated person (ignoring verification challenges).
I agree with this but with the added point that i don’t think i could be any less careful when i feel a cold coming on even if i went and got an additional booster.
I’ll consider a fall booster if recommended and i have no reason to suspect any recent exposures have tested my immunity.
I didn’t know about you, but I’m not eligible for another booster now. And my reaction to the last one was strong enough that i don’t think i need one, not until covid levels in the wastewater go up again, or there’s a significant new variant.
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I didn’t get a booster last fall…i just assume annual booster will be a thing and rates will go up each fall.
Maybe at some point this all just disappears like Trump predicted. 
It does seem to be getting smaller and smaller over time, even after people have stopped thinking about it, which is nice. I think, we could agree that your “duty” (or “charity”) to vaccinate like 1/10th whatever it might have been a few years ago.
Covid shots rolled out starting Dec 2020. “Breakthrough” infections of fully vaccinated were so common that PH quit tracking them 5/1/21. To stop on 5/1 means that this pattern of fully vaccinated getting Covid was clear well before 5/1. Any talk of “care for others” should have died then and there. And then mandates? Please
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Regarding the argument that both infections and vaccinations result in the immune system killing your cells, the key difference I’ve heard is that a respiratory disease, by it’s nature, targets cells in your respiratory system, whereas the mRNA vaccines have no particular cell preferences. I am not sure how valid this argument is, but it does suggest a plausible basis for believing vaccines are a bigger risk to, say, heart tissue.
The problem with that argument is that COVID infects a diversity of cells, not only respiratory.
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I think there was still a pretty big risk reduction during 2021 as many were still waiting to become fully vaccinated through the summer. Maybe not high risk and willing at that point, but maybe close enough to those that were that mandates were still supportable.
But yeah, i think we are now a couple years into management through diligence with a shrinking base of the population at risk for their first covid infection (this includes my parents btw, they are vaccinated but take no additional precautions).
Yeah that’s why old guys shave their heads and young women shave their snatches
Gotta keep those pesky lice at bay
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I think at the time, the people who were trying to protect their parents and immune-compromised hoped that breakthrough infections would be less infectious.
And then mandates? Please
But yeah… I wish the world was less into mandates.
It does, except that blood vessels are one of the type of tissues covid targets, and getting vaccinated significantly reduces your odds of stroke and other clotting disorders. Vaccination can increase the risk of myocarditis in young men, but not as much as catching covid increases the risk of myocarditis. (There is a small age group where the risk is comparable, but for most people the disease is vastly more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccine.)
The virus uses a cell surface receptor shared by the respiratory system, the gut, the circulatory system, and several other organs.
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