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Comment by Grazester | Hacker News Reader

I thought the most recent study said that prior Covid infection does not offer as much immunity as the vaccine does. This was posted here also.

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The study published about a month ago found more consistent protection, i.e., the mRNA vaccines produce a consistent level of spike proteins and therefore antibodies in all recipients, whereas some people who had milder prior COVID infections did not produce the same level of antibody response.

The unanswered question is how much that's protective against future infection. Nobody really knows. Antibodies are an important part of the immune system, but the real key for long-term protection is the effect on memory T-cells. I'm not aware of any studies on that topic.

There has been a study a month ago looking into B/T cell response for the covid vaccines. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0829 Article is hypertechnical, fortunately there is a more approachable twitter thread from the first author, https://twitter.com/rishirajgoel/status/1448711946010710023. The HN thread is pretty bare, and I remember a more active conversation, so perhaps either that happened on a dupe, or there is another article along those lines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881923

"To summarize:

- Antibodies decrease but memory B/T cells are stable for ≥6 mo

- Immune memory is still effective vs. variants

- "Boosting" from memory = significant (but temporary) increase in antibodies w/ less impact on already durable memory cells"

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