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Did Omicron Give You Super Immunity?
🕑 Added 2022-01-26 16:30:51 +0000 UTCYou might have super immunity from COVID-19, and could help end the pandemic this year! A study just published yesterday by the journal “Science Immunology”, shows that people who catch COVID-19 after being vaccinated, or who were vaccinated after having the virus showed signs of “super immunity” or “hybrid immunity”, which is 10x more potent than vaccination alone, and generates an overwhelming immune response to future exposure to the virus.
This is incredibly good news, not just because it protects you individually, but because over time, as the virus runs into an ever-expanding pool of human immunity, the number of cases, and therefore the transmission rate, the mutation rate, and obviously the hospitalization and death rates are expected to plummet. In fact, researchers believe this is already happening, due to the extremely high breakthrough rate of the Omicron virus.
Those with super immunity are expected to have a much more mild response to the virus going forward, and with enough people carrying this type of immunity, COVID will be unable to spread as quickly as it has in the past, and have an opportunity to fizzle out instead of continuing to burn through the population.
However, importantly, if you are NOT vaccinated against the virus, then you don’t gain super immunity, and you’re still just as likely to spread the disease, be hospitalized, or fall victim to it - which we’ve seen pretty clearly play out over the last year, especially since the vaccine became widely available. 99% of the people who died from COVID in 2021 were unvaccinated - and it’s believed that the Omicron variant mutated within an unvaccinated person.
At this point, people refusing to get vaccinated are almost the only ones left who are getting severely sick and dying from the disease, and also the ones who are generating these new vaccine-resistant variants, not to mention the most likely to spread the virus themselves. This is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
On the other hand, if you are vaccinated, and you end up with super immunity - you’re literally helping to bring an end to the pandemic, and saving countless lives, while being very unlikely to suffer a severe reaction to a breakthrough infection. The fact that the Omicron variant has been aggressively transmissible and vaccine-resistant has led to skyrocketing case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths despite being more mild.
Regardless of the outcome, that’s bad. But it’s also turning out that, as we suggested early in the Omicron wave, this combination could be a pathway to ending the pandemic, or more realistically, turning COVID into an endemic, which is a seasonal, less deadly virus like the flu or common cold.
Omicron became the dominant strain overnight, and this new super immunity that we’re seeing is largely the result of Omicron breakthrough infections. Ultimately, between super immunity and Omicron, we’re well on our way to seeing a common cold version of COVID that allows deadlier mutations to die out thanks to this boosted immune response.
We’re certainly not out of the woods yet, and the Omicron wave is still ongoing, but those of us who have been responsibly vaccinating, boosting, social distancing, and masking are literally responsible for this wave of super immunity, and a potential end to the pandemic as early as this year. Meanwhile, those who have politicized and lied about the virus are doing everything they can to extend this pandemic, and make it worse - mostly for themselves, but also for everyone else.
This wave of super immunity even proves that the false claim that “immunity from natural infection is just as good as vaccination” is completely wrong. There are no cases of super immunity among those who are not vaccinated, and natural immunity is, on average, short lived, and doesn’t guarantee a strong immune response. It’s also significantly riskier, which is why no responsible medical professionals are recommending that anyone intentionally contract the virus, vaccinated or not.
The major benefit to super immunity is that it strengthens the argument for a vaccinated herd immunity to bring an end to the pandemic, which is seemingly the safest and most effective method.
We’re looking at a future that’s not very far off, where instead of year round lockdowns, masks, and social distancing, we see a yearly vaccine like the flu vaccine, and a mild mutation of COVID that hits us seasonally. There’s no clear sign that we will ever eradicate COVID, but relegating it to a few days in bed, or a very treatable and low rate of hospitalization is the best possible scenario we can hope for, and one that we are optimistically already seeing signs of.
