Originally Posted by
Oly Olson
My Rep. says opinions are like elbows - most folks have a couple. OK so..."science"? Isn't that what we're supposed to fall back on? Remove emotion. Remove politics. What is the science?
Good news: COVID victims have lasting anti-body protections
As I said to my Rep., those who have had COVID really should be considered “fully vaccinated” on par with the current vaccines. The 13 hours of add pay could be an enticement for them to upload medical proof that they have anti-bodies vs. a vaccination. They have been vaccinated by nature. Perhaps as well as a “vaccine passport” what we need is an “antibody passport”. Let’s be solution oriented here - include as many pilots as possible in the “gets”. But most importantly let’s not allow our pilots to be coerced into getting medical treatments that they do not need? Seems like a winning attitude to me, but it’s not the prevailing attitude.
From the article you posted (emphasis added by me):
Originally Posted by
Article
People who were infected and never had symptoms also may be left with long-lasting immunity, the researchers speculated. But it’s yet to be investigated whether those who endured more severe infection would be protected against a future bout of disease, they said.
“It could go either way,” said first author Jackson Turner, PhD, an instructor in pathology & immunology. “Inflammation plays a major role in severe COVID-19, and too much inflammation can lead to defective immune responses. But on the other hand, the reason why people get really sick is often because they have a lot of virus in their bodies, and having a lot of virus around can lead to a good immune response. So it’s not clear. We need to replicate the study in people with moderate to severe infections to understand whether they are likely to be protected from reinfection.”
This study is a promising step toward answering important questions. The researchers themselves openly admit it is limited in scope and that a lot more work needs to be done to understand immunity across the full spectrum of the recovered population.
Understand, I’m just pointing out where certain questions remain unanswered- this isn’t a hill I’d die on. I think vaccinating the recovered should be way down the list of priorities, and may very well prove to be entirely redundant. Of course, we’ve only verified infection in around 10% of the country’s population, so this issue isn’t a factor in the lion’s share of vaccinations being performed.
As to the pay issue, the airline’s primary concern is keeping the operation running. If you’re immune, good for you-
they care about whether or not you’re legal to fly the trip. If all the destinations we served accepted prior infection as proof of immunity, you’d have a much better case to make on that front, but for now it’s still pretty inconsistent how different countries are health-screening their border entries.