These articles say Covid immunity may only last a short time:
I am assuming that the body doesn’t recognize its immune response to a vaccination being any different than its immune response to a genuine Covid infection. If immunity lasts only months, then wouldn’t we need to get a booster vaccination every few months?
Also, if the virus mutates, then wouldn’t we need another new vaccine, and another one, etc.?
From what I have read - Some vaccines have shown they produced significantly higher anti-body counts than the counts from recovered patients.
Stronger and better vaccines coming later is likely. I would be all for boosters, and have done so with other vaccinations. The first vaccine I took to prevent shingles was said to be 50% effective. The next one was rated at 90% effective.
The virus will mutate, and science will need to respond.
My opinion is that if you can kill the virus in most of a country at one time, controlling future outbreaks will be possible and fairly routine if science is listened to.
This is an uncomfortable truth, but there may never be a COVID vaccine that provides lasting protection. Humankind is plagued by thousands of viral diseases that have no vaccine, from mild (common cold, herpes) to severe (HIV).
AFAIK, nobody has ever created a vaccine for an infectious coronavirus. We’re in uncharted territory.
Yep, this is exactly right, and getting long-term immunity is not at all going to be a certainty. SARS2 is probably here to stay in one form or another for quite a while.
As I’ve posted on another thread or two, we might be better off trying to find treatments that deal with the worst of symptoms. I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll eventually find a cocktail in tandem with better diagnosis and treatment - maybe by the end of the year.
It’s also possible, though, that we may have mutations and waves of COVID that occasionally get a little rough every so often.
Coronaviruses have been around for a long, long time. And they are notorious for mutating.
~VOW
There is a vaccine for a canine coronavirus, so creating a vaccine for a coronavirus is not inherently impossible. And one major reason why there isn’t one for SARS is that there wasn’t enough demand for it, which seems unlikely to be a problem in this case.
What were the other major reasons?
For traditional vaccines that trigger the immune system via an inactivated virus, I imagine that would be a concern.
What about the vaccines in development that use RNA or that inject a harmless virus into COVID viral material in human cells? Since those act differently than the immune system, would they be unaffected by immunity wearing off?
Money, and lack of test subjects once the epidemic was over.
There’s also the possibility that we might wind up with something like the flu vaccine, which does indeed need to be renewed every year, and which doesn’t provide perfect protection, but which nevertheless has a significant impact in keeping the disease relatively under control.
at least one of the vaccines being tested is based on RNA. It might be a broader key for an immune system to recognize different variations of the virus.
And more than anything else the unfortunate finding that animal studies showed vaccine induced antibody-dependent enhancement - meaning those who were vaccinated got worse disease than those who were not.
One of the open questions for an immunization strategy is whether or not specific antibody levels are even a decent proxy for lasting protection. It may be that the T-cell response (much harder to measure) is more important (and likely much more long lasting).
That’s what I was going to say. For example, just because we don’t have chicken pox antibodies circulating, that doesn’t mean we’re not still immune to it.