I didn't see any mention in the article about memory T and B cells. The article only mentions antibodies. Where did you see this?
Upon infection or vaccination, your body will also produce antibody-producing memory cells to help respond more quickly if you are infected in the future. If you want to test for these memory cells, you can't use antibody tests. You have to use specialized tests that look specifically for the memory cell responses.
There are some commercially available tests, such as https://www.t-detect.com/, which looks at the T cell response.
A lot of the commercially available antibody tests will fail to detect a prior infection after just a few months. T-Detect now says that its test can pick up infections that occurred 10 months ago. 10 months is probably not the limit of detection; it's just based on the amount of time T-Detect has been available to the public.
Researchers have found memory T cells that respond to the original SARS-CoV virus 17 years post-infection:
In the months before I was vaccinated I had on two or three occasions something that felt a bit different from the usual cold/flu/allergies that I get, but was not severe enough to justify trying to get a COVID test. I'm curious if I actually have had COVID or not.
It's like saying "All people run out of edible food (antibodies) within hours of being hungry (exposure to distinct protein)". Well, yes, but we have the ingredients to make them in the fridge (memory cells). Just measuring the amount of cooked food (antibodies) will tell you how much I can eat right now, but I'm not going to starve (get sick) in the absence of the cooked food (antibodies) since I have the tools - raw food (memory cells) in case I get hungry (exposed again).
In the case of this study, they tell us we've run out of cooked food in 6 months. That doesn't tell us whether we'll starve, because we could have hella stores in the pantry and they specifically did not measure any of that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02260-9
When you encounter the virus again, those with a healthy immune system will ramp up antibody production.
This is a very misinformed statement as this data hasn't been collected yet.
I checked my tetanus antibodies(actually anti-neurotoxin antibodies) recently and they were 5 times over what's considered adequate and I haven't had (at that point) a booster shot in over 20 years.
Edit: I read the paper and it just speaks of humoral immunity. Wikipedia:
> Humoral immunity is the aspect of immunity that is mediated by macromolecules found in extracellular fluids such as secreted antibodies, complement proteins, and certain antimicrobial peptides.
Antibodies I'll get to below. Complement proteins and antimicrobial peptides links go to articles saying they're part of the innate immune system (covid protection is done by the adaptive immune system if I understand it correctly). So antibodies is the relevant part:
> Together with B and T cells, antibodies comprise the most important part of the adaptive immune system. They occur in two forms: one that is attached to a B cell, and the other, a soluble form, that is unattached and found in extracellular fluids such as blood plasma. Initially, all antibodies are of the first form, attached to the surface of a B cell – these are then referred to as B-cell receptors (BCR). After an antigen binds to a BCR, the B cell activates to proliferate and differentiate into either plasma cells, which secrete soluble antibodies with the same paratope, or memory B cells, which survive in the body to enable long-lasting immunity to the antigen.
So B cells (well, some but not all) are responsible for long-term immunity, distinct from antibody levels. An antibody (further up the article) is a Y-shaped cell with receptors on the tips which it uses to bind to and thereby tag pathogens for other parts of the immune system to deal with or to neutralize it directly.
So it doesn't sound to me like the paper talks about how long vaccination has an effect, just how long the Y-shaped receptors are in the blood for. This is the so-manyth research I've seen looking at antibodies rather than memory cells. I'd be curious why, but either way it's an incomplete way of looking at protection.
You can't just throw out vague statements like that and pretend it's the truth and fact. There are innate and adaptive components, but even the adaptive components, which you conveniently threw everything under, aren't as simple and straightforward as you make them out to be.
For a very "basic" introduction to the adaptive immune system the wikipedia article has some reference[1].
Part of the whole ordeal about Covid is that the whole adaptive response is nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out to be and any actual epidemiologist agrees with that.