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Comment by mvanaltvorst | Hacker News Reader

Say that Pfizer were able to simulate 50 possible mutations and put all of them into a single vaccine, would there be any risk that the antibodies could interact with each other in some way that makes the vaccines less effective?

Also another scenario: say that we get yearly Covid shots that contain the latest strains, would these accumulate over the years and start interacting with each other?

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As I understand it, the second isn’t an issue so 50 vaccines over 50 years would be fine, that’s how seasonal flu vaccines are done.

The first is mostly a question of how similar they are. Best case original vaccine covers all strains without modification, worst case you need 50 different vaccines. But the most likely combination is a mix where you might need say 5 vaccines, each of which over an overlapping subset of the 50 strains to various degrees of effectiveness.

The immune system presumably has a limited capacity of circulating antibodies. By introducing new antibodies, do we reduce the amount of previous antibodies, and does this reduce their immune response? Is there a concept or metric of "antibody dilution"?

Antibody production ramps up and down rapidly, it’s memory cells that get altered by vaccines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory

That said the immune system is extremely complex, but here is a simplified version, which gives a reasonable overview: https://microbenotes.com/cells-of-the-immune-system/

While correlation is not causation, I find it interesting that the human immune system only remembers the common cold and seasonal influenza for several months, but diseases like the polio for much longer.

https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/21802

"The common cold" is a loose nebula of hundreds of different, unrelated, virus strains. They're not even all the same TYPE of virus.

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