btbuildem
14 hours ago
It's fascinating how unscientific ideas take root, because people want to believe. On the face of it, the idea of "immunity debt" is preposterous, yet it was amplified across the media -- perhaps because it was a convenient explanation that required no action from anyone.
bee_rider
13 hours ago
Why does it seem preposterous? If anything it seems dangerously not-preposterous, a sort of epidemiological “common sense” explanation.
Lots of people experienced stuff like “getting chickenpox and then gaining immunity,” so the idea that not getting any illnesses for a couple years during lockdown would result in us being resistant to fewer illnesses seems not at all preposterous.
Apparently general infection rates are still high, so it didn’t bear out. But preposterous? Not really…
GoatInGrey
12 hours ago
From an evidence-based perspective, it's preposterous primarily because it originates from the 2021 Cohen paper in which they open with unequivocal assertions that immunity debt is real, then walk back on the literal last page to apply the term MAY to their theory. If it started from an instance of a classic motte-and-bailey fallacy, it gets automatically thrown on the mountain of failed research attempts. Because we don't have time to give every sqawk its full due. Particularly if the sqawker isn't even taking their own ideas seriously.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-medical-critical-...
The fact that it conceptually makes sense to a layperson is irrelevant in a truth-seeking context. Much for the same reason that a theory that Google functions by paid human labors manually assigning results to search queries they predict you will search ahead of time "making sense" to a layperson is meaningless in discovering how the system actually works.
paulryanrogers
12 hours ago
Having had chicken pox twice, and read up on shingles, please get your kids vaccinated. Surviving an infection doesn't make us stronger, at least not at the individual level.
Symmetry
12 hours ago
Of course exposure to a disease will make your body more able to deal with that particular disease. The question is whether it will make your immune system stronger in general like your muscles, or whether it tends to be depleted like your blood sugar. In general because you immune system has a finite memory for diseases and because diseases tend to mutate faster when infecting larger number of people its more like the later.
defrost
9 hours ago
The position put forward in the BMJ paper is, as per your comment,
> In general because your immune system has a finite memory for diseases and because
SARS-CoV-2 is linked to “an unusually high level of ‘indiscriminate’ killing of T cells,”6 says Leitner, adding that this observation is “reminiscent of” measles, which can cause immune amnesia by depleting memory B cells (a different type of immune cell), leaving people vulnerable to pathogens they were previously immune to.
Brazilian researchers found that covid-19 triggered a sharp rise in T cell exhaustion and cellular ageing.10 Although the comparator group was limited, the strongest effects were seen in CD8+ T cells, which suppress latent viruses such as EBV and VZV. These effects were seen even after mild infections.
> diseases tend to mutate faster when infecting larger number of people
> its more like the latter.
fzeroracer
12 hours ago
> Lots of people experienced stuff like “getting chickenpox and then gaining immunity,”
Using chickenpox as an example of people's common knowledge of immunity is inadvertently very funny here.
ChrisMarshallNY
14 hours ago
One of my favorite cynical quotes, is:
> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken
swed420
10 hours ago
> It's fascinating how unscientific ideas take root, because people want to believe. On the face of it, the idea of "immunity debt" is preposterous, yet it was amplified across the media -- perhaps because it was a convenient explanation that required no action from anyone.
It's a symbiotic combination of that plus capital interests driving a narrative to achieve a desired outcome for our archaic consumption-based economy.
Both parties of capital have lots of blood on their hands, but according to them, they're "just doing what the people wanted."
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
jimmaswell
13 hours ago
This is my first time hearing the phrase. Google says:
> Immunity debt refers to a theoretical concept that describes a potential decline in immune system function following a period of reduced exposure to infectious diseases.
Is this the same concept you're referring to? I would hardly call that a proposterous hypothesis at face value. It's reminiscent of the generally-accepted "hygiene hypothesis", that lack of early childhood exposure to some germs causes poor immune response or even asthma later in life.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/consumers-biolo...
This page seems focused on RSV in particular, noting that in that specific case RSV seems to not have the beneficial effect of exposure to some other thing, yet still says it may have "seemed obvious" that it should have.
> The “hygiene hypothesis” is supported by epidemiologic studies demonstrating that allergic diseases and asthma are more likely to occur when the incidence and levels of endotoxin (bacterial lipopolysaccharide, or LPS) in the home are low. LPS is a bacterial molecule that stimulates and educates the immune system by triggering signals through a molecular “switch” called TLR4, which is found on certain immune system cells.
...
> It may seem obvious that, since both the RSV F protein and LPS signal through the same TLR4 “switch,” they both would educate the infant’s immune system in the same beneficial way. But that may not be the case.
itronitron
12 hours ago
Intuitively, immunity debt is using the same logic as vaccines, that the immune system builds defenses to infections when it is exposed to them (and not before.) But I'd never heard of 'immunity debt' as a term before and I am assuming that it's promoted by people that are also anti-mask and anti-vax.
Anecdotally, I played a lot more in the dirt as a young child than any of my children, and I had much more severe asthma and allergies than they have, including the one that contracted RSV as a two-week old infant and went on to get sick just as often as their two siblings.
Eisenstein
11 hours ago
These are infections that people are usually exposed to so there should already be an immunity. I think what they find preposterous is the notion that the immune system needs 'exercise' in that if we don't constantly give it challenges it will get weaker, like our muscles do.
apercu
13 hours ago
It’s also fascinating to me that people who want their feelings to be facts lean in to conservative politics in the country I reside in.
estearum
12 hours ago
It's a global phenomenon. Really interesting evidence today is if you try to invoke Grok (actually pretty darn good at gathering facts!) in nearly any conversation on X.
If you're conversing with a conservative, you will often get a kneejerk block – clearly an immune response from an LLM disputing their beliefs over and over again.
user
14 hours ago