Given how the pharma companies are examining anti-body half life, exploring booster shots, and considering vaccinations against variants (like lambda), can any of the learnings go into a more durable, more broad vaccine?
But yes: expect newer vaccines tailored to currently-circulating strains to appear; the existing mRNA vaccines produce copies of the spike protein sequenced more than a year ago. That's what we've done for influenza for decades, though not with the same kind of precision.
I think, given the difference in response, the term natural immunity makes sense. You have to choose something and I don’t think ‘natural immunity’ says anything about vaccine immunity being unnatural.
The antibody memory made from a Natural Infection seems like it would be much richer and have much more variety than the mRNA vaccine.
I would imagine the attenuated virus vaccine would be closer to Natural immunity.
I don't know if this is the case, but I offer this as an example of how our biological systems may be complicated beyond intuition.
right, that's why the natural way provides the best immunity
The thinking (if I understand correctly) in targeting the spike protein was that mutations to the spike protein may render the vaccine less effective, but would also render COVID-19 less infectious.
It's a clever hack to rely not on whether the spike is mutation-prone, but instead on the odds that a mutation would result in a less effective virus that the vaccine wouldn't be necessary for.
Interestingly this means if you have natural immunity and are a regular blood donor you shouldn’t get the vaccine since it deprives the healthcare system of a lifesaving treatment.
[1] https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/dlp/coronavirus--...
https://www.fda.gov/media/136798/download
If you expand the boxes on your link, you'll also see that they aren't specifically collecting convalescent plasma, as demand has decreased. Perhaps that is changing with the recent uptick (but given the demographics of blood donation, they'll probably have to change their rules if they need a lot of it; most people donate ~1 time).
did it already.
in both vaccine induced and survivor induced immune responses, long term immune systems come online to store a memory of the disease so that on future challenge, more of those antibodies will be produced by people fairly rapidly after future exposure, even when your blood stream isn’t full of covid antibodies anymore.
When there are this many cases floating around, though, you can't afford to wait for the spin-up time.
If i'm asking for the same image every 500ms from your webserver, do you want to go to disk every damn time, or are you gonna cache it? Same deal, kinda.
The booster shots are being touted for every 12 months or so.
Not sure your statement tracks.
You and I aren't walking around with bloodstreams full of anti-measles antibodies, despite being vaccinated in infancy: but you can bet that you will be if you encounter a bunch of measles in the wild, in relatively short order.
The question is: are the covid vaccines like tetanus vaccines or like measles vaccines? So far, the evidence points to the latter, but the desire for a booster anyway is driven by the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic; neither tetanus nor measles are.