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Can any of the findings from the properties of how natural immunity works be guided in to future COVID 19 vaccines? Given how the pharma companies are examinin
by wpasc 5y ago
Can any of the findings from the properties of how natural immunity works be guided in to future COVID 19 vaccines?
Given how the pharma companies are examining anti-body half life, exploring booster shots, and considering vaccinations against variants (like lambda), can any of the learnings go into a more durable, more broad vaccine?
- hprotagonist 5y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03738-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03738-2 did it already.
- briefcomment 5y agoI think GP is referring to the fact that boosters are being pushed, which implies vaccine immunity is not persistent. It has certainly been pushed since when that study was published.
- hprotagonist 5y agowe still need the primary antibody count up high, because we’re still in a pandemic, thus the desire for boosters. in both vaccine induced and survivor induced immune responses, long term immune systems come online to store a memory of the disease so that on future challenge, more of those antibodies will be produced by people fairly rapidly after future exposure, even when your blood stream isn’t full of covid antibodies anymore. When there are this many cases floating around, though, you can't afford to wait for the spin-up time. If i'm asking for the same image every 500ms from your webserver, do you want to go to disk every damn time, or are you gonna cache it? Same deal, kinda.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoAnitbodies fade after several months. The booster shots are being touted for every 12 months or so. Not sure your statement tracks.
- hprotagonist 5y agodon't conflate primary antibodies with b-cells. You and I aren't walking around with bloodstreams full of anti-measles antibodies, despite being vaccinated in infancy: but you can bet that you will be if you encounter a bunch of measles in the wild, in relatively short order. The question is: are the covid vaccines like tetanus vaccines or like measles vaccines? So far, the evidence points to the latter, but the desire for a booster anyway is driven by the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic; neither tetanus nor measles are.
- ajross 5y agoVaccine immunity IS "natural" immunity. It works the same way, by exposing the body's immune system to virus components such that they product a response. The only difference is that with a vaccine those components don't add up to a viable organism. But yes: expect newer vaccines tailored to currently-circulating strains to appear; the existing mRNA vaccines produce copies of the spike protein sequenced more than a year ago. That's what we've done for influenza for decades, though not with the same kind of precision.
- chuinard 5y agoDamn you got downvoted real quick.
- kfprt 5y agoIt's not quite the same, delivery (mechanism/location/encapsulation) is different.
- JimBlackwood 5y agoSure, but there is a real difference in response between vaccine/virus. I think, given the difference in response, the term natural immunity makes sense. You have to choose something and I don’t think ‘natural immunity’ says anything about vaccine immunity being unnatural.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoHow is an mRNA strand that encode for a single very specific protein on a virus the same as the entire virus? The antibody memory made from a Natural Infection seems like it would be much richer and have much more variety than the mRNA vaccine. I would imagine the attenuated virus vaccine would be closer to Natural immunity.
- Buttons840 5y agoYour body might accidentally create an immunity to a portion of the virus that mutates. Perhaps the protein produced by vaccine mRNA forces your body to create an immunity against a portion of the virus that is less likely to mutate. I don't know if this is the case, but I offer this as an example of how our biological systems may be complicated beyond intuition.