Its important to note that Immunity debt is a concept that anti lockdown activists created in 2020. It was not in medical texts before that point, it never had any science behind it. It was a political term used to end mitigations against Covid not a scientific fact.
There is no rethinking here from serious science (The BMJ is a really bad journal and one of the ones that supported this garbage), the science on infections has been clear for decades, every infection damages us. Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects. Its not a subtle change, in Long Covid research its become increasingly hard to find controls, many people without symptoms show the same blood based markers of immune dysruption and cognitive slowing.
Are you criticizing something other than what is in this article? This article fully rejects the immunity debt hypothesis.
The article suggests that covid infections cause immunity amnesia similar to other known viruses. This is based on shingles and EBV reactivation incidence being higher in people who had covid.
You should read the comment again. It says that this article is debunking something that was never a serious claim. That is the first thing it says, and it says it very directly. It is also set apart as its own paragraph, for emphasis.
And yet was claimed again and again by e.g. pediatrics societies in Switzerland and France to justify ending every restrictions (thereby mass contaminating children before they could be vaccinated, and contributing to more spread and more mutations of the virus)
> Its important to note that Immunity debt is a concept that anti lockdown activists created in 2020. It was not in medical texts before that point, it never had any science behind it. It was a political term used to end mitigations against Covid not a scientific fact.
No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.
In fact, doing what you're doing right now -- trying to present the hypothesis as activism in order to remove it from the realm of reasonable discussion -- is inherently political.
> Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects.
There is no good evidence for this claim. We have robust T- and B-cell mediated immunity to prior Covid infection, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands of papers showing it. Please stop.
The general origin of this meme is the article linked in the piece, which, if you read the abstract you'll see is making a very limited claim about early infection, and cannot be used to support the notion that "Covid damages the immune system" in any long-term sense, particularly when we know the opposite is true from many, many other studies:
I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative:
> Ashish Jha, former White House covid-19 response coordinator under President Biden, has publicly rejected this hypothesis. “There’s a lot of bad information out there about how covid-19 damages the immune system. It really doesn’t,” he posted on X in early 2024. More than a year later, his view is unchanged.
>nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared"
The flu didn't disappear, and we know very well why it almost disappeared: it is far less contagious than SARS-CoV-2, and masking and the huge dip in international travel stopped it.
>It's a hypothesis
Here in Switzerland (and in France), it hasn't been presented by pediatrics societies as an hypothesis at all, but as a fact and the main argument to reopen immediately. It has also been used again and again to explain the huge waves of infections of many illnesses that surged after the end of lockdowns, and absolutely none of them ever quoted that "immune debt is just an hypothesis", and none of them have suggested any other alternative hypothesis such as "SARS-CoV-2 has a detrimental effect on the immune system or health in general".
Because to admit so would be to admit the mass infection of children had been a massive mistake on their part.
>I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative
And Jha has no explanation for the increased, sustained (and now synchronised) waves of infections and illnesses that are plain to see. He has nothing. This is the fiasco of "masks aren't proven to work" again.
> No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.
I hypothesize the rise in these less common infections is none other than Santa Claus. You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific.....the fact that it's complete made up bullshit that, like the parent says of the "immunity debt" concept, "never had any science behind it.", is what makes it unscientific. That it's made up and was never shown by any evidence.
We should dedicate resources to finding Russell's teapot. My hypothesis is that there's useful information left in there by the almighty creator of the universe.
So what? Is there a medical term for the beneficial effects of putting dirt into your mouth as a child? How often does the expression "common sense" appear in medical texts? Therefore "common sense" is politicized garbage!
"Every movement we make damages our muscles" is also a true statement and can be misused by idiots.
Importantly, though, humans evolved to live in environments full of random dirt microbes. We didn't really evolve to deal with repeated respiratory infections. Spillovers from wild animals would happen and kill a bunch of people from whatever group experienced them but then there'd be nobody left to infect and that strain would die out. It's only evolutionary relatively recently that our connected communities have become big enough to sustain this sort of disease. And the rate at which diseases cross over has increased rapidly as our population, contentedness, and meat diet has. Something like half the species of common cold didn't exist in 1800.
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.
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…
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.
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.
There's clearly a long-term aftermath, but it's not well understood. There are other diseases where that occurs, despite the initial infection seeming to be over. Chickenpox as a child can turn into shingles as an adult.[1] The virus is never completely cleared.
Rebutting this kind of stuff turns into a link-sharing competition. For any debated theory I can show you a thousand links saying the opposite of whatever claim is being advanced, but you'll just assume my links are self-selected.
Look at the content of the article. Literally every quote in this piece is some scientist speculating. That's completely fine, and what scientists do, but the "journalist" is spinning it into a narrative of "scientists believe X", which is both true (some scientists can be found to support literally any claim), and misleadingly over-confident.
HIV 10 years later turns into AIDs. Immune disruptions are especially scary because without an immune system the constant bombardment the human body is under from viruses, bacteria and fungi overwhelms us quickly.
Finding Covid viral fragments in people long after the infection is very concerning, we don't know how its staying in the body or where but it seems likely its persisting.
Please stop making this comparison. There's a clear reason why chickenpox can re-emerge as shingles later in life - herpesvirus maintains a circular chromosome within the nerve cells. It's a known feature of the virus family, and it's detectable [1].
There's absolutely no reason to believe that SARS-CoV2 has similar capability, and those who cling to this hypothesis are engaging in pseudoscience. Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.
> Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.
You might think that, but in the past two decades theres been so many "how did we miss that?" in so many fields. I'll let field experts bring specifics up- I only know popularized examples like Roman Concrete. And the ever-easy Mars unit-conversion error.
You can speculate if you like, but the claim you're advancing is fantastical to anyone who has studied virology, and requires an accordingly fantastic level of supporting evidence.
I assume, with this level of confidence, that we understand everything about Parkinson's now. It is a nerve disease so closely associated with influenza that there was speculation in the 60s that when the last child born during the Spanish Flu epidemic died, it would be completely eliminated as a common disease.
Shouldn't we just look for the ring that we learned how to detect herpes in nerves? Because every virus has to be constructed exactly like herpes in order to infect nerve cells, apparently.
I don't know what you are talking about definitions-wise here. Things can definitely be accute and not severe. This is easily resolved by looking at a dictionary.
Oh ok, let's post it on Youtube, where they censor things all the time
The replies are pretty funny, if predictable. This is someone who's an industry expert. And meanwhile those like (say) McCullough who are literally some of the most celebrated and cited in their field get marked for being misleading/being promulgators of misinformation
It's Semmelweis all over again but it's especially galling because the HN karma/reputation system is such that I can't downvote anyone if I don't have enough karma, and for going against the groupthink on covid I'll never get the necessary karma; it's like a worse version of Reddit
Its important to note that Immunity debt is a concept that anti lockdown activists created in 2020. It was not in medical texts before that point, it never had any science behind it. It was a political term used to end mitigations against Covid not a scientific fact.
There is no rethinking here from serious science (The BMJ is a really bad journal and one of the ones that supported this garbage), the science on infections has been clear for decades, every infection damages us. Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects. Its not a subtle change, in Long Covid research its become increasingly hard to find controls, many people without symptoms show the same blood based markers of immune dysruption and cognitive slowing.
Are you criticizing something other than what is in this article? This article fully rejects the immunity debt hypothesis.
The article suggests that covid infections cause immunity amnesia similar to other known viruses. This is based on shingles and EBV reactivation incidence being higher in people who had covid.
You should read the comment again. It says that this article is debunking something that was never a serious claim. That is the first thing it says, and it says it very directly. It is also set apart as its own paragraph, for emphasis.
>something that was never a serious claim
And yet was claimed again and again by e.g. pediatrics societies in Switzerland and France to justify ending every restrictions (thereby mass contaminating children before they could be vaccinated, and contributing to more spread and more mutations of the virus)
I'm not arguing the claim. I'm asking a person to read was said, and respond to it, instead of to something that was not said.
> Its important to note that Immunity debt is a concept that anti lockdown activists created in 2020. It was not in medical texts before that point, it never had any science behind it. It was a political term used to end mitigations against Covid not a scientific fact.
No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.
In fact, doing what you're doing right now -- trying to present the hypothesis as activism in order to remove it from the realm of reasonable discussion -- is inherently political.
> Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects.
There is no good evidence for this claim. We have robust T- and B-cell mediated immunity to prior Covid infection, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands of papers showing it. Please stop.
The general origin of this meme is the article linked in the piece, which, if you read the abstract you'll see is making a very limited claim about early infection, and cannot be used to support the notion that "Covid damages the immune system" in any long-term sense, particularly when we know the opposite is true from many, many other studies:
https://academic.oup.com/jleukbio/article-abstract/116/6/138...
I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative:
> Ashish Jha, former White House covid-19 response coordinator under President Biden, has publicly rejected this hypothesis. “There’s a lot of bad information out there about how covid-19 damages the immune system. It really doesn’t,” he posted on X in early 2024. More than a year later, his view is unchanged.
https://x.com/ashishkjha/status/1747412684889354266
>nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared"
The flu didn't disappear, and we know very well why it almost disappeared: it is far less contagious than SARS-CoV-2, and masking and the huge dip in international travel stopped it.
>It's a hypothesis
Here in Switzerland (and in France), it hasn't been presented by pediatrics societies as an hypothesis at all, but as a fact and the main argument to reopen immediately. It has also been used again and again to explain the huge waves of infections of many illnesses that surged after the end of lockdowns, and absolutely none of them ever quoted that "immune debt is just an hypothesis", and none of them have suggested any other alternative hypothesis such as "SARS-CoV-2 has a detrimental effect on the immune system or health in general".
Because to admit so would be to admit the mass infection of children had been a massive mistake on their part.
>I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative
And Jha has no explanation for the increased, sustained (and now synchronised) waves of infections and illnesses that are plain to see. He has nothing. This is the fiasco of "masks aren't proven to work" again.
> No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.
I hypothesize the rise in these less common infections is none other than Santa Claus. You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific.....the fact that it's complete made up bullshit that, like the parent says of the "immunity debt" concept, "never had any science behind it.", is what makes it unscientific. That it's made up and was never shown by any evidence.
Calling it anything other than a hypothesis is unscientific. Claiming it as a hypothesis is not.
We should dedicate resources to finding Russell's teapot. My hypothesis is that there's useful information left in there by the almighty creator of the universe.
So what? Is there a medical term for the beneficial effects of putting dirt into your mouth as a child? How often does the expression "common sense" appear in medical texts? Therefore "common sense" is politicized garbage!
"Every movement we make damages our muscles" is also a true statement and can be misused by idiots.
>Is there a medical term for the beneficial effects of putting dirt into your mouth as a child?
"hygiene hypothesis"
Importantly, though, humans evolved to live in environments full of random dirt microbes. We didn't really evolve to deal with repeated respiratory infections. Spillovers from wild animals would happen and kill a bunch of people from whatever group experienced them but then there'd be nobody left to infect and that strain would die out. It's only evolutionary relatively recently that our connected communities have become big enough to sustain this sort of disease. And the rate at which diseases cross over has increased rapidly as our population, contentedness, and meat diet has. Something like half the species of common cold didn't exist in 1800.
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.
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…
One of my favorite cynical quotes, is:
> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken
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.
As someone who is *not* interested in biology, I don't understand why this "immunity debt" is driving so much debate.
If I understand Vox's definition of the term[0] correctly, this should be very easy to confirm or debunk.
Why it isn't been the case yet?
[0]: "A central premise of immunity debt is that for many infectious diseases, repeat infections are milder than the first infection."
> A central premise of immunity debt is that for many infectious diseases, repeat infections are milder than the first infection.
This is also the fundamental, well understood, mechanism of vaccines.
Uh oh. We don't even understand "long COVID" yet.
There's clearly a long-term aftermath, but it's not well understood. There are other diseases where that occurs, despite the initial infection seeming to be over. Chickenpox as a child can turn into shingles as an adult.[1] The virus is never completely cleared.
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-shingles-if-y...
Measles, too: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/09/child-dies-of-horrify...
Several variants of Malaria can be The Gift That Keeps On Giving: https://www.mmv.org/malaria/symptoms-and-treatments/relapsin...
Malaria is not a virus. It's caused by a eukaryotic microorganism.
I know. I guess that I should have mentioned that.
However, from the article, it seems that they believe that COVID just whacks the immune system, in general, so everyone gets to belly up to the bar.
Just to be clear: "they", in this case, is a cherry-picked sample of scientists by a journalist.
I think that's pretty much always the case, these days. Shouldn't be a problem, finding a cherry-picked sample to refute it.
Rebutting this kind of stuff turns into a link-sharing competition. For any debated theory I can show you a thousand links saying the opposite of whatever claim is being advanced, but you'll just assume my links are self-selected.
Look at the content of the article. Literally every quote in this piece is some scientist speculating. That's completely fine, and what scientists do, but the "journalist" is spinning it into a narrative of "scientists believe X", which is both true (some scientists can be found to support literally any claim), and misleadingly over-confident.
HIV 10 years later turns into AIDs. Immune disruptions are especially scary because without an immune system the constant bombardment the human body is under from viruses, bacteria and fungi overwhelms us quickly.
Finding Covid viral fragments in people long after the infection is very concerning, we don't know how its staying in the body or where but it seems likely its persisting.
Please stop making this comparison. There's a clear reason why chickenpox can re-emerge as shingles later in life - herpesvirus maintains a circular chromosome within the nerve cells. It's a known feature of the virus family, and it's detectable [1].
There's absolutely no reason to believe that SARS-CoV2 has similar capability, and those who cling to this hypothesis are engaging in pseudoscience. Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5584196/
> Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.
You might think that, but in the past two decades theres been so many "how did we miss that?" in so many fields. I'll let field experts bring specifics up- I only know popularized examples like Roman Concrete. And the ever-easy Mars unit-conversion error.
You can speculate if you like, but the claim you're advancing is fantastical to anyone who has studied virology, and requires an accordingly fantastic level of supporting evidence.
The only claim I'm making is "never underestimate humanity's ability to hold to an initial assessment/viewpoint/assumption."
Which has so many examples it's almost a truism.
I assume, with this level of confidence, that we understand everything about Parkinson's now. It is a nerve disease so closely associated with influenza that there was speculation in the 60s that when the last child born during the Spanish Flu epidemic died, it would be completely eliminated as a common disease.
Shouldn't we just look for the ring that we learned how to detect herpes in nerves? Because every virus has to be constructed exactly like herpes in order to infect nerve cells, apparently.
As i heard recently. Severe acute respiratory syndrome.
Something acute is severe by definition, but without the S we'd all be talking about ARS, so they added the Severe
I don't know what you are talking about definitions-wise here. Things can definitely be accute and not severe. This is easily resolved by looking at a dictionary.
"acute" is paired with "chronic" and indicates onset, not severity.
So…CARS?
Pins and needles is usually acute, and harmless
Chronic pins and needles should be checked urgently by a doctor as it's very serious
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Is it really a surprise? It’s full of half baked conspiracy theories.
> The lizard-brain mentality trait is now easy to spot, plus those possessed cannot deviate from the exposed demonic global hive-mind narrative.
Seriously?
Guys, a lot of you presumably work for FAANG. Please tell me you're not this oblivious in the decisions that you make on a daily basis
If you think it's a good thing by history to just marginalize all dissent the history books you will be a part of will not be kind
Maybe because "what the heck is rumble? Sure isn't a primary source."
Oh ok, let's post it on Youtube, where they censor things all the time
The replies are pretty funny, if predictable. This is someone who's an industry expert. And meanwhile those like (say) McCullough who are literally some of the most celebrated and cited in their field get marked for being misleading/being promulgators of misinformation
It's Semmelweis all over again but it's especially galling because the HN karma/reputation system is such that I can't downvote anyone if I don't have enough karma, and for going against the groupthink on covid I'll never get the necessary karma; it's like a worse version of Reddit