… when are you going to give me validated closure on the JFGLF saga!?
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No more to say than on the final days of the zombie AO.
@NormalDan if you weren’t on the AO in its final days, PM me and I’ll send you deets I gave there.
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How’s the wife & kid(s)?
And the dog? (the dog?)
I get my 2nd Pfizer shot next Friday. Everything around me has been booked up, so I’m driving 3 hrs. Would normally wait, but MamaSmurf has bad asthma and is on the fence about getting vaccinated bc she’s pregnant.
My brother got hit pretty hard with body aches / chills after getting his second pfizer shot. We generally react similarly so I’m preparing to rest that weekend.
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Perhaps the nurse thought my attempting exercise wouldn’t be an issue when she saw me. 
I am going to only do 3 of normal 5 bouts, at low intensity.
Tiredness persisting and not as easy to concentrate as normal. Nasal symptoms which arose are more like the beginning of a cold than allergies, but just a slight amount of runniness, nothing like sinus problems. Starting to abate. Will continue to avoid NSAIDs/Tylenol unless it gets much worse.
On the question of if us Covid survivors need the vaccine, a doctor friend told me the vaccine provides a different level of immunity than the disease. I can ask for a link if anyone is interested.
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I’d be interested in learning more about this “different level.”
I really should remember to take notes when he talks.
We’re all depending on you.
Here it is: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2101667]
From the article that helped me find the paper: “ A new study showed that vaccination after infection produces six times more antibodies than a vaccine by itself.”
What that article appears to show is that
- People who already had documented antibodies to covid rapidly increased how many antibodies they had after a single dose of RNA vaccine.
- They didn’t show much (if any) additional increase after a second does
- People who didn’t have antibodies developed antibodies more slowly after 1 dose, to a level comparable to where the already-exposed started out.
- People who didn’t have antibodies at the start of the study had much higher levels after the second dose than after the first, comparable to the already-positive people after a single dose.
Also, it was a fairly small study. Oh, and no one in the study became ill enough to be hospitalized after being vaccinated.
They also didn’t assess side effects after the second dose in their “convenience sample.”
Side note: why does that paper seem to have almost as many authors as study participants?
I don’t think this means what your doctor implied.
To me this looks like the antibody reaction from natural immunity is 6 times stronger than from the vaccine. (Obviously, this is the reaction to the vaccine SCov2 spike protein, and they didn’t measure reaction to SCov2 itself, so 
)
I read it as people who already had antibodies to covid ended this study with more antibodies than those who started without antibodies.
The article is poorly written, and hard to read, but it looks like those who got two doses of vaccine -whether or not they started with antibodies – ended with higher antibody titers than the starting point of the antibody-positive cohort. Which I think is why this study supports vaccinated those who have had covid.
In addition to being an awfully small study, there are a number of other things I don’t like about it. They looked at people who had pre-existing antibodies, for instance, rather than “people who have recovered from covid”. Some people who have recovered from covid have a lot of antibodies, and some have unmeasurable antibodies. Some of the latter might have memory cells that will create antibodies if-needed. And some probably don’t. But either way, censoring the participants to those who are known to have robust antibodies prior to being vaccinated seems less useful than a lot of other things they might have studied.
fwiw, there was some question about my degree of immunity to measles. I got an antibody test. And when it came up positive, I figured I was done, and didn’t need a measles vaccine. Now, measles produces reliable life-time immunity from a single exposure, and most coronaviruses don’t. But still. That just seems like the wrong group to study.
There’s no indication of when those who previously had covid (presumably, or at least had antibodies, possibly through cross-immunity) developed those antibodies. Because of memory cells, there’s no reason for them to be walking around with high antibody titers for months on end vs the antibody response of an active “infection” from a recent vaccination.
So comparing the post-2nd-shot titers of those who started with no antibodies to the pre-shot titers of those with pre-existing immunity is apples to oranges.
Seems like the better (fairer) comparison is the post-1st-jab of the naturally immune to the post-2nd-jab of the newly immune. (Except they don’t say how long after 2nd dose those were measured.)
That would surely have been a more interesting thing to study. Better yet if they used “people with documented prior cases of covid” vs. “people without antibodies who are very unlikely to have previously had covid”.
Also, it would have helped if they’d had it edited by someone who speaks graceful English. It reads like it was written by a computer.
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Maybe that’s what happens with 32 authors.
Nasal symptoms went away but fever arrived at 27hrs or so. Napped for 3hrs, fever now low grade. At least I feel like they administered something.
Good.
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