I feel entitlement-vibes

In large parts of England they have elected not to -- the cost of doing so is too high, and it was literally driving pharmacies bankrupt (which you'd think would have made it obvious that there was a lot of demand...). So they almost all stopped. I think last I checked there were two left providing vaccinations in all of Cambridgeshire, both with huge backlogs.

> This is illiterate nonsense. "Natural immunity" fades within months from the infection.

There are two distinct things going on here. Antibody levels drop fast -- this is a *good thing* because if you had the immediate post-infection level of antibodies to every disease you ever caught your blood would be a thick soup at best. The level you get after antibody ramp-up is the level you need to drive out an *established disease*, not defeat a newly-landed one). Antibody levels are really easy to measure, so have got most of the attention.

What probably does not fade so fast is T cell recognition of viral antigens: T cells have a remarkably long life (it can be decades!) and remain receptive as long as they live -- but can be killed off by other things, can go nuts attacking some other disease they are also receptive to and get exhausted doing that, etc. But if they survive all that, they will probably protect you from getting actually killed by covid for a long, long time. Not always -- this is statistical -- but probably.

Neither of these things really kick in fast enough to prevent viruses that replicate in the respiratory tract from getting in there, replicating, then going straight back out to infect someone else. That sort of immunity is very hard to attain, which is why no covid vaccine to date prevents transmission, and why the common cold is so incredibly hard to stop.

But, y'know, it's not just getting killed I want to be protected from! I don't much want to land in bed for three weeks feeling like death either, like I did last time I got covid (let alone the two months of being too enervated to do much work). And *that* is helped by reducing exposure, by, say, getting people who might be infectious to wear masks, or just not going to FOSDEM.

You mentioned "natural immunity", not I. Vaccine immunity fares no better (it physiologically can not do better, for obvious reasons). Your rant there is completely off and disconnected from the body of published evidence - your illiteracy claim has the sense misplaced, if anything. But.. .that's not for LWN.

… unless you continue to be exposed to low-level background viral load. Granted that this probably is not the case for most of the troglodytes who only leave their cave once a year, for FOSDEM. :-P

> Vaccines do not do great for infection prevention,

Depends on the vaccine. They did super with smallpox (and would do the same with measles if it wasn't for the conspiracy nutcases).

> This is illiterate nonsense. "Natural immunity" fades within months from the infection.

And that's ill-informed arrogance.

The reason the common cold (AND CoVid!) is usually harmless is because it is so common. It comes round every few months in a slightly new variant and re-infects you. And because your body remembers the old variant it fights the new one off with ease. So your natural immunity IS as close to perfect as it can get. The virus is constantly changing, your immunity is constantly changing, there's a balance that shifts back and forth.

HINT: Even when CoVid was brand new, one of the factors that helped it spread so fast, was because the MAJORITY of victims did not know they'd been infected. It was just the unfortunate older people who got hit so hard because it was too different from anything they'd ever met before.

Cheers,

Wol