Re:Cellular immunity to SARS-CoV2 found at 6 months in non-h...
by joveian on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:03PM
(#24983947)
I wouldn't assume that the reason resistance doesn't last in some case is just due to suboptimal triggering, although as I said I don't know much of anything about vaccine development. I do often encounter people with inflated opinions of modern medical understanding that does not match reality, so I am suspicious that your claims are not necessarily grounded in reality. I'm also not interested enough in the topic to look into it in any detail. I do agree that it isn't necessarily impossible for a vaccine to cause lasting resistance even if direct exposure does not.
It's triggering your immune system to produce and/or store things, the presence of which then confers resistance when subsequently exposed to the actual pathogen.
So from that perspective, the next question is, "Do naturally occurring pathogens, presented in a natural manner, produce an optimal triggering themselves?" To which the answer, as you might guess from the messiness of real-world biology, is "No."
It turns out that while amazing our immune systems are also general purpose and adaptable, and such systems can get confused, or go off on a tangent, or focus on the wrong thing, etc etc.
Vaccines interact with this system by balancing two things: (1) how do I trigger the strongest, purest immune response that's effective on the thing I want to immunize against & (2) how do I avoid triggering such a strong immune response that I convince the body to attack itself?
It turns out, with modern biology, we actually can do better than nature on (1). Even if (2) still requires some guesswork (and a lot of testing).