> This is flat out FALSE.
Allow me to rephrase: We have vaccines that protect us from severe diseases and hospitalizations (what you wrote after and which I mostly agree with) but its efficacy for milder symptoms wane after some months. And mild symptoms that translates into perma brain fog and other conditions is not something I want to take my chance with.
Most likely, if the best case scenario happens, I'd still take they yearly covid shot.
> but hospitalization rates and death rates are plummeting. That is the human humoral immune system working.
Not what's happening in countries around me. UK (17%), France (175%), Germany, Finland are seeing hospitalizations rise up again.
It remains to be seen if this is the last wave and you are right or if it's now the new normal.
Whatever the cause, considering the damages a mild covid can have, this is not a virus you want to wreak havoc on your system too many times in your life. Killer t-cells are fun but you don't want your immune system in perpetual immune response mode.
edit: regarding protection against severe form (we should be talking of consequences rather than form): vaccines had a ~95-97% efficacy. With Omicron, even tough it stays high, it doesn't stay that high. What worries me is that we are talking yearly flu shots but covid will likely require 6 months booster shots if you want to keep riding the vaccine for protection against all form/consequences.
The vaccines are quite effective against a variant that is no longer in play and hasn't been for quite a while.
The people who are vaccinated against original Wuhan-Hu-1 make memory B-cells against Omicron as well. Even after boosting with Wuhan-Hu-1 spike antigen the neutralization titers against Omicron in the blood are high, even after all the spike mutations.
And again, there are around a thousand T-cell epitopes to spike and around 80% of them are conserved with Omicron, and there is very, very good reason to think that number doesn't ever get close to zero.
Your naive model of how the immune system works like a key and lock where if you change one of the pins then the vaccine stops working entirely is deeply flawed.
The human immune system is the end product of a hundreds of millions of years arms race between organisms and pathogens, and this isn't its first trip around the block with a pandemic virus that mutates. The whole way the humoral/memory immune system works is designed to deal with mutations.
That isn't fair on your part.
The bit that you picked out is factually correct. It is also correct that the vaccines + previous immunity will give an improved chance at a positive outcome.
But it's not the same as it was for the first wave, the vaccines were very specifically developed and tested in that setting and every future mutation had a worse response, due to attenuation due to time and mismatch with the target. This is not a 'lock that doesn't fit the key', it is a vaccine that simply works less well on things that it wasn't very specifically designed for, and that is totally expected. The degree to which the difference materializes changes with time and further mutations, with each of those contributing some element to the final efficacy calculation. How much is impossible to tell ahead of time.
Again this is just wrong.
If you've been vaccinated then you have B-cells that match Omicron, even though you weren't vaccinated with Omicron's spike.
Maybe my analogy didn't work, but you have a flawed understanding of the immune system.
As a concrete and well-studied example, the H1N1 strain of influenza stopped spreading in the human race in 1957. Nobody after that was exposed to it, everyone born before that was exposed going back to 1918. It was displaced by the H2N2 pandemic in 1957. It mutated in pigs for 50 years. Then it underwent triple recombination in 2009 and jumped back to humans -- with an H1 gene that was derived from the human strain and an avian N1 gene that hadn't ever been seen before.
The impact of that 2009 pandemic was considerably blunted by human cross reactive T-cell immunity in the older population who had seen the long-lost relative of H1 protein back before 1957. That 50 year old "pre-vaccination" did not wane and was cross reactive after 50 years of mutation and adaptation in pigs, and was still effective enough to protect against severe disease and death.
Nobody had immunity against infection of course, but that cross reactive immunity to H1N1 in all the older people helped to dramatically blunt the impact of the 2009 pandemic to the point where the human impact was lower than normal human influenza.
Cross-reactive B-cells and T-cells to future variants to SARS-CoV-2 are going to work the same way. Most of the epitopes will still be conserved and the T-cell reaction will be able to clear the disease and protect against severe disease and death.
You don't need reimmunization every time the virus mutates slightly, that would be poor design. The humoral immune system works closer to a Bayesian spam filter (arguably better).
Do you believe that there will be vaccine 'updates' (which especially for Moderna they were talking about from very early on), or is it that this mechanism is strong enough that until there is a real immune breakout we won't need them?
Wait, didn't the 57's H1N1 strain reappeared unchanged in the 70's and didn't a vaccination campaign happen then ? (I seem to remember it's mostly likely an unintentional lab leak, which would explain it didn't change in 25 years).
This is flat out FALSE.
There are two different possible endpoints for vaccine efficacy. One is efficacy against infection, one is efficacy against severe disease and death.
Efficacy against infection is very difficult because it is mediated by circulating neutralizing antibodies. It is just difficult to get sterilizing immunity against a muscosally invading respiratory virus in the first place. And then neutralizing antibodies wane over time.
Efficacy against severe disease is almost certainly going to be more durable because it is mediated by memory T-cell and B-cells having been already formed due to prior exposure to a related antigen.
Unfortunately the result of the phase 3 trails on the mRNA vaccines were way too good on VE against infection and it was sold as being 90% effective and as that waned people declared them to be ineffective. That should never have been the yardstick though. And in fact before those results were announced Fauci was trying to condition the population to expecting a 50% VE against infection number as being good enough. The 90% efficacy results just blew that all away though.
What gets lost is that they're still >90% effective against severe disease/death and nothing has changed there. And you can see it in the headlines with Omicron. It is almost still certainly as intrinsically virulent as D614G, if not actually more intrinsically virulent than Delta itself, but hospitalization rates and death rates are plummeting. That is the human humoral immune system working.
I'd argue everyone should probably get boosted because of the maturation in immune response which is measured against Omicron. Once we're done with that though I fully expect that people can stop getting any future vaccines and they'll just get a cold next time they catch SARS-CoV-2 until they wind up being over 65 or a cancer patient or something -- just like every other ILI-causing virus.
(Or you know keep getting boosters like you get flu shots -- I'm honestly not sure what I'll do about it, but its going to look a whole lot more like yearly flu shots than the world-record mass immunization campaign we've seen up until now).