Quote:
Originally Posted by kevinb1983
Nick,
Care to expand on why this isn't currently the case. I'm honestly not saying what you believe to be the case isn't true. IMO, like the article says, its still too early to know until we've studied it further.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/hea...cid=spartandhp
I would definitely distinguish between the argument that a positive antibody test implies futures immunity and the argument that being infected once implies future immunity.
I'm certainly willing to accept that a lot of the antibody tests may have flaws, and none of these tests are likely to be completely perfect. So it is possible for a person who has never been infected in the first place to register a false positive, and we should certainly be trying to improve the reliability of our tests, use only the most proven tests, and test people multiple times when possible.
With respect to the second argument, I do rather strongly believe that being infected renders you immune to reinfection for some reasonable length of time. We can't at this point know how long the immunity lasts, but we can be pretty sure it is several months and have read most scientists believe it is at least two years.
We cannot prove deductively that this is true. Just like if you give someone a vaccine, observe them for a few months, and they don't get infected, you haven't proven the vaccine is effective. But if you give enough people the vaccine and no one gets infected, you can start to feel pretty confident that it is working. We've had almost 5 million people test positive for the virus, and have seen no confirmed examples of independent reinfection.
On top of this, we have the many studies observing antibodies (over 99.5% of people known to be infected were later found to have antibodies in one study), and tests by Chinese scientists on monkeys (where they tried but always failed to reinfect monkeys who had previously has the virus).
So, for people doubting immunity given what we know so far, I have a question: How are you ever going to trust any vaccine trial?
Given our accelerated trial protocols and procedures, any vaccine that appears effective is going to be approved based on far less direct and indirect evidence than the accumulated evidence we already have for immunity.