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.

> 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.

It was a term coined to allow discussion of a reasonable hypothesis that had suddenly become relevant, which was then latched onto by people who found it useful. The causality that you are claiming is backwards.

> 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

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.