Really good news’ on virus immunity

While the world was wrapped up in the promising news of Moderna’s vaccine, my colleague Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers science for The Times, sent out a cryptic tweet that immediately piqued my interest.

This afternoon, Apoorva delivered: According to new research, immunity to the coronavirus may last years, perhaps even decades.

That’s good news because some experts worried that resistance to the virus could be fleeting, and it’s potentially great news for our ability to keep the virus under control with vaccines.

For months, reports of waning antibody levels led scientists to fear that resistance to the virus may be short lived. But researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology who led the study looked at the body’s immune response in 185 patients, ages 19 to 81, who had recovered from the virus.

They tracked antibodies, but also B cells that can make more antibodies, and two types of T cells that kill other infected cells. The researchers also took blood samples from 38 people over many months.

The team found that antibodies stuck around, declining modestly six to eight months after infection, although the amount varied widely among the participants. T cells showed only a slight, slow decay in the body, while B cells actually grew in number. Researchers extrapolated from the slow level of decline over eight months, and concluded that people would most likely be protected for a few years. (How long, exactly, is still hard to predict.)

“This is really good news,” Apoorva told me. “Because if natural infection is producing such a strong immune response, a vaccine certainly will, because vaccines generally tend to produce stronger, more durable immune responses than natural infections.”

Experts also initially worried that resistance to the coronavirus might be similar to the flu, which would require people to be vaccinated every year. That would have created a logistical nightmare: The entire world would have to be vaccinated regularly just to keep the pandemic under control. But this research implies that may not be the case.

“It suggests we may have some breathing room, and that may help every country get back on its feet, in terms of the economy and keeping its population safe,” Apoorva said. “It also means that we may actually be able to contain this pandemic a little sooner than we had worried.”
The New York Times
Me: you have to remember that Scientists don’t deal with Coronavirus, but have you wait 14 days to get Covid in the body, where they try to cure it with vaccines – so a vaccine won’t stop you getting Coronavirus again, in your head, but it might stop Coronavirus becoming Covid again, in your body – making you a Coronavirus dispenser for 14 days at least, to everyone you come into contact with.
Common sense says to me, kill the virus in your head and never get Covid, but who ever said that Scientists did anything sensible, when so much MONEY is to be made out of vaccines?