Re:Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
by lamontcg on Thursday June 10, 2021 @07:02PM
(#27467081)
> I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?
Because the science on the immunity of coronaviruses is very poorly understood because previously they gave us the sniffles for 2 weeks and didn't cause the worldwide economy to shut down so nobody studied them well enough.
And studies had been done which seemed to showed that immune waned after 6-24 months with common cold coronaviruses.
More recent studies have now found that while people will get reinfected with HCoV-229E that immunity to an individual strain seems to be very durable/permanent and that on a scale of years the virus eventually mutates to achieve escape immunity and reinfects:
Note that was published as a preprint back in Dec 2020, so They(tm) didn't have this article back last summer when the question of reinfection was first raised.
6 months of immunity after natural infection was what was _guessed_ by some cautious immunologists last summer, based on the prior studies of coronaviruses. With better studies and with more time spent studying the only coronavirus that actually matters it looks pretty confident that its going to be more like years. The vaccines produce stronger results measured by neutralizing antibody titers so we _guess_ that they'll be more certain to hit those kinds of timelines. We still don't understand how long it'll take for this virus to achieve escape immunity, but the safer money is on the idea that it'll become endemic, but second time around those with natural or vaccine immunity won't be anywhere nearly as severely affected (e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741)
Because the science on the immunity of coronaviruses is very poorly understood because previously they gave us the sniffles for 2 weeks and didn't cause the worldwide economy to shut down so nobody studied them well enough.
And studies had been done which seemed to showed that immune waned after 6-24 months with common cold coronaviruses.
More recent studies have now found that while people will get reinfected with HCoV-229E that immunity to an individual strain seems to be very durable/permanent and that on a scale of years the virus eventually mutates to achieve escape immunity and reinfects:
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
Note that was published as a preprint back in Dec 2020, so They(tm) didn't have this article back last summer when the question of reinfection was first raised.
6 months of immunity after natural infection was what was _guessed_ by some cautious immunologists last summer, based on the prior studies of coronaviruses. With better studies and with more time spent studying the only coronavirus that actually matters it looks pretty confident that its going to be more like years. The vaccines produce stronger results measured by neutralizing antibody titers so we _guess_ that they'll be more certain to hit those kinds of timelines. We still don't understand how long it'll take for this virus to achieve escape immunity, but the safer money is on the idea that it'll become endemic, but second time around those with natural or vaccine immunity won't be anywhere nearly as severely affected (e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741)