Natural immunity

Natural Immunity! is this year's Herd Immunity!... or, for other cranks, its False-Flag! and Russian Collusion!. It sounds sciencey, so people who can't do science parrot this in PJMedia comments.

Jonathan Isaac - who's a celebrity, so Americans will actually listen - offers a scintilla of fact here: natural immunity does exist. Plenty of people caught the Pooh Flu last year; after however-long they suffered from its effects, they do have antibodies now. Genetics offer some additional protection, to some; Razib is on that case.

Against that, the former HalfSigma writes: Vaccines are much more effective than natural immunity. As expected, because the vaccines target the spike protein, while natural immunity targets the entire virus most of which is unimportant because it's the spike that attaches to your cells. Linking to this twitterblog by Eric Feigl-Ding.

The Rs10774671 gene is interesting, I must say. If that's the G purine, you're Golden. If it's not-G, namely A... you're in trouble. I assume those who have this whole gene missing by some ancestral transcription-error are in even worse shape.

Per Razib: Native Americans, as with so much else to do with virus-fighting, are disproportionately AA here. Africans go GG. Apparently this was shared with Neander (and we can assume Denisovan) ancestry; Africans kept it, some modern-humans lost it and had to get G back from the Neanders.

The original paper by Wickenhagen et al. offers the details although I won't pretend I understand most of it. I gather it involves Type I Interferons, which may or may not be present in the A549 type of lung cell. You want IFN-1 in your A549 if you enjoy breathing. They call IFN-1 Stimulated Genes, ISG; OAS1 is that ISG which fights the Pooh Flu in particular.

Now, where there is a vax shortage, I would absolutely agree with Natural Immunity when doing triage as to who gets vaxxed first. Thing is: Natural Immunity isn't as effective as vax-driven immunity. Another thing is: we do not have a vax shortage in America. Americans have a shortage in other important bodily cells, namely neurons.

The good news is, their feelings don't matter.