How long will vaccines offer protection against covid?
Current thinking seems to be that a booster will be required within a year. This seems to be based on an observed drop-off in anti-bodies in the vaccinated person. The same phenomenon is observed among recovered patients.
For instance, here is a quote from
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/health/us-coronavirus-friday/index.html
“We have to see how long the protection lasts. We know it lasts at least six months,” This was a statement attributed to US Surgeon General Murthy.
We know a lot about the human body. However, there are many things about the body that we cannot measure. For instance, The study is the best attempt yet to define features of the immune response that can act as a proxy for protection against COVID-19, known as a ‘correlate of protection’, says Daniel Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London. “Finding the correlate of protection has really been a holy grail for this disease, as for others. It’s surprisingly hard to do.”
This is taken from
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01372-6
The researchers estimate that a vaccine has an efficacy of 50% even if it induces antibody levels 80% lower than those found, on average, in a person who has recovered from COVID-19.
The same study brings up an interesting suggestion that longer-term protection against severe forms of covid can be provided by killer T cells.
As you can see, there is a lot of unknown, but possibly discoverable, facts about covid.
Back to my question: How long do you think covid protection will last with the currently available vaccines?
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26 Answers
I don’t know the answer, I don’t think anyone knows yet.
Some more questions to add: are they suggesting a booster because they are considering actually changing the target of the vaccine because of new strains? Or, just to boost antibodies using the exact same vaccine?
I have tried to find information on whether the flu vaccine actually loses efficacy in such a short time (under a year) or if the yearly vaccine is purely suggested because of new strains that it targets. Is the flu vaccine efficacy based on the nature of the vaccine and that it is a guess regarding what strains will be moving the population, and it is an imperfect guess, or that the vaccine even when perfectly guessing which flus will be here sill has such low efficacy? I know we have gone back and forth before about how efficacy is figured for the covid vaccine, I still question how the numbers are derived and if they are derived the same way for each type of vaccine.
I really think we need nitty gritty science knowledge and no double talk to find out the answer. Have scientists ever bothered to test how long antibodies last for a flu vaccine? Or, they don’t care, because most years there is at least one new strain in the vaccine.
Back to covid, if we come up with good treatments we can expose vaccinated people to the virus. I think you mentioned a while back they were doing that type of study in some country.
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I sent this question to the member who is an expert. He’s an ICU doctor with 30 years experience. He has been hosting Covid threads throughout the pandemic. He’s got one going now. We’ll have to wait and see if he’s got time for this question.
Logic tells me until vaccines are no longer effective. It’s anyone’s guess how long that will be, and any expert could only, logically, say the same.
The best person to answer would be an epidemiologist. I don’t believe there are any epidemiologists on this site. Also, since this virus and vaccine are so new, it’s really an unknown, as of yet.
Nobody knows. Booster shots likely.
I think that, based on an observed drop-off in antibodies in the vaccinated people, a booster will be required within a year.
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