There is one concern that occurred to me that I haven’t really seen anyone talk about with the currrent vaccine crop.
They don’t know how long the current vaccines will keep you immune. It’s possible they won’t last, and they’ll need to either keep giving them or get a better vaccine.
So is there any risk that taking a vaccine now will mess up the chances at immunity later on? There was talk of that sort of thing with virus itself very early on–that it could be possible that getting a lighter infection could make a subsequent infection worse if the infection didn’t grant immunity.
Basically, I’m just wondering if there’s any potential future downside to getting the current vaccines, and how big that would be.
Everything else I hear about just talks about the safety of this vaccine, or what it will or won’t do, and not about possible effects in the future.
I think the general idea is to get the entire Earth’s Herd Immunity so high that like Small Pox it will be gone. I don’t know if we can achieve that or not, but isn’t that what we’re basically aiming for, eradicate COVID-19 within 2 years after ending the epidemic in 2021.
But to answer your specific question, the answer is unfortunately easy. They don’t know yet. Your worry could be a real concern, but the medical community appears to be betting against it and have hopes of wiping out COVID-19.
I do not see how you jumped to that conclusion. I didn’t mention natural immunity at all in my post, and the answer to the question I asked would be the same no matter how long natural immunity lasts.
That said, I am aware that they did test for immunity over a period of time, and so they do at least have a minimum for how long immunity will last both from the current vaccines and for actual infection from the virus.
I also am aware that there could be no direct tests on the question I asked. But I was hoping there were some educated guesses based on what we do know, whether about this particular type of virus, vaccine science, immunity in general, etc.
Heck, one data point would be if there has ever been a vaccine where, having taken the first one, it made subsequent ones less effective.
The vaccines right now are supposed to be a way to put an end to the pandemic. Nothing more. Whether or not they can help eradicate Covid is another issue and won’t be known for some time. The vaccines are to help us reset the global clock to 2019 activity wise (hopefully not immunity wise).
It’s possible and perhaps even likely that they won’t eliminate Covid. But making it just another manageable disease will be a big win.
Getting a vaccination now that meant you could never get good lasting immunity would be one of those unlikely events that never happens, like having a new Boeing 737 MAX flying straight into the ground !
The Oxford vaccination is in 2 injections: there is speculation that the first injection is reducing the effect of the 2nd injection, and that the total effect is less than if the dosage was modified (or the timing modified).
However, the effect in the Oxford vaccination is that the subjects acquired ‘less’ immunity, not ‘no immunity’.
The risk that the present vaccine is incompatible with future trial vaccines is small: but the risk that future approved vaccines are incompatible with present vaccines is not real. The definition of ‘future better vaccine’ includes ‘works with all cases, including people with in-effective past vaccinations’ .
I think BigT is talking from an individual cost/benefit analysis, not a society-wide one. For an individual, is there a plausible chance that for them this vaccine will do something like wear off, but at the same time, prevent later, better vaccines from working? As a society, it’s best if everyone take it–but should a rational individual opt out?
I don’t think so. It seems like no one can know for sure, but it’s very unlikely to work that way–and even if it does, the chances of getting COVID now counterbalance that.
I believe he means that like, this vaccine may “train” your immune system in a way that’s less effective, but also prevent “retraining” it into a better, more effective form later. Like, permanently close the door on more effective vaccines.
I don’t know that that is really plausible, but I can see wondering: it was counterintuitive that the SARS vaccines would actually lead to a worse case of SARS if you got it, but that apparently was a real thing.
There’s a plausible a priori mechanism here. If a vaccine introduces an antigen that does not result in an adaptive immune response against the antigen, it may instead lead to tolerance of the antigen. One of the theoretical advantages of mRNA vaccines is that mRNA is inherently unstable, so if it doesn’t produce an immune response it’s not going to keep churning out the spike protein for a long time. But I think the more compelling answer with this issue is that the trials directly address this, tolerance and hence worse infection rather than the desired protective response would be showing up.
But then, as you say, there is also the weird thing that happened with the putative SARS vaccine that wasn’t a tolerance effect, the Ab appeared to facilitate cell entry for other strains.
So I don’t think the OP’s concerns are totally without foundation. But I don’t think there’s anything unusually risky here, these would be always be theoretical low-probability concerns with any vaccine. As @Melbourne says, any future better vaccine will be certainly be engineered to take any unlikely weird effects from past vaccines into account. Taking into account human ingenuity, I think it’s extremely unlikely that taking one of the current proven vaccines would somehow leave you with no good options in the future.
Yes, this is part of what made the question pop in my head.
I assumed the answer would be that it’s not a big risk, or else we wouldn’t be doing it. But I couldn’t find any discussing the topic I described. And I knew I could come here to get good, solid answers.
Thank all of you for addressing this nagging question frp, my anxious brain (i.e. the part of my brain I try to ignore, but sometimes seems to maybe have a point).
I’m old enough to have been vaccinated, once, against smallpox.
Effectiveness - 95 percent.
Length of protection - 3 to 5 years
Virus status - Extinct outside protected laboratories
I’m not saying COVID works like smallpox. But the first generation vaccines may be good enough to make COVID a rare disease without need for many, or any, boosters. We just don’t know yet.
Fair. But bubonic plague rarely spreads person to person, and it can be treated with antibiotics, so reducing the contact with rodents (it really, with fleas) is good enough. One random infection can’t really balloon into an outbreak.
Well, we really haven’t seen an outbreak balloon from a covid infected cat yet, have we? I am not sure the mere existence of the coronavirus being found in some animals makes them definitely a dangerous reservoir for the virus to jump back.
Right, but Smallpox was really unique in not having a non-human host. We can certainly dramatically lower instances of COVID, but it seems like a pipedream to think we can eradicate it. We haven’t eradicated anything else–not even Polio (though we are close).