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BREAKING: The FDA voted 16-2 against a third Pfizer booster shot for Americans 16 and older.
darn. I was hoping to get mine soon.
BrooklynDad_Defiant!
@mmpadellan
·
5m
BREAKING: The FDA voted 16-2 against a third Pfizer booster shot for Americans 16 and older.
Not enough data available for them to decide to approve
Link to tweet
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55 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
What We Actually Know About Waning Immunity
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/waning-immunity-not-crisis-right-now/619965/
Vaccines don’t last forever. This is by design: Like many of the microbes they mimic, the contents of the shots stick around only as long as it takes the body to eliminate them, a tenure on the order of days, perhaps a few weeks. What does have staying power, though, is the immunological impression that vaccines leave behind. Defensive cells study decoy pathogens even as they purge them; the recollections that they form can last for years or decades after an injection. The learned response becomes a reflex, ingrained and automatic, a “robust immune memory” that far outlives the shot itself, Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. That’s what happens with the COVID-19 vaccines, and Ellebedy and others told me they expect the memory to remain with us for a while yet, staving off severe disease and death from the virus at extraordinary rates. That prediction might sound incompatible with recent reports of the “declining” effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, and the “waning” of immunity. According to the White House, we’ll all need boosters very, very soon to fortify our crumbling defences. The past few weeks of news have made it seem as though we’re doomed to chase SARS-CoV-2 with shot after shot after shot, as if vaccine protections were slipping through our fingers like so much sand.
The reality of the situation is much more complicated than that. Despite some shifting numbers, neither our vaccines nor our immune systems are failing us, or even coming close. Vaccine effectiveness isn’t a monolith, and neither is immunity. Staying safe from a virus depends on host and pathogen alike; a change in either can chip away at the barriers that separate the two without obliterating them, which is exactly what we’re seeing now. As the hyper-contagious Delta variant continues to blaze across the country and much of the world, more vaccinated people are encountering the virus and occasionally getting infected enough to trip a coronavirus test. But our shots are still guarding against disease and death—the standard our shots were meant to meet, and the most crucial element of making the virus “a much more manageable threat,” Müge Çevik, a medical virologist at the University of St. Andrews, told me. “We need to have much more realistic expectations of these vaccines” and what they can teach our immune systems to do, Çevik said. The good news is, it’s quite a lot. Immune responses don’t last forever. They’re supposed to wane, and the fact that they do works to our advantage. The first time someone meets a virus or a vaccine, defensive cells must scramble. A wave of fast but imprecise fighters—members of the innate immune system—rushes in to wall off the assailant, buying time for the body’s more sophisticated sharpshooters to gather their wits. This latter group, which makes up the body’s adaptive arm, takes several days to really fire up.
But the wait is worth it: After a couple of weeks, the blood is rife with antibodies—molecules, made by B cells, that can sequester viruses outside cells—and aptly named killer T cells, which can blow up cells that have already been infected. Eventually, as the infectious threat passes, our immune response contracts; frontline B and T cells, no longer needed in their amped-up state, start to die off. Antibody levels—one of the easiest immune metrics to measure—slip downward over the course of several months, before roughly levelling off. That’s perfectly normal, Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, told me. “You have a big increase at the beginning, then a decline.” Consider the alternative: If humans never quieted any of the immunological furore that follows infections and simply kept accumulating antibodies for every pathogen we came across, we’d all have burst a long time ago. Even attempting to maintain that kind of immune reservoir “would require so much energy—I don’t even know where you’d keep all those cells,” says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington. A downtick in antibody levels can come with consequences. Antibodies are among the few immune actors capable of waylaying a virus before it infiltrates a cell; when present in high-enough amounts, they can quash a developing infection. But where a virus is abundant and speedy and antibodies are relatively scarce, the body’s defenses are much more liable to crack, which is why protection against infection will be the first to erode.
This issue might be especially pronounced after receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine, which is delivered into an arm muscle. Injected vaccines are ace at prompting the production of IgG antibodies in the blood; they’re less good at coaxing out the IgA antibodies that patrol the moist mucosal linings of the nose and mouth and corral respiratory viruses at their natural point of entry. IgG antibodies are good travellers and can eventually flock to the site of a growing infection. That takes time, though, and when fewer of them are bopping about, their eventual arrival may not be enough to pen the pathogen in place. Antibody levels will taper in the months following vaccination or infection, but that doesn’t mean they plummet to zero, Bhattacharya told me. Although most of the B cells die off, some stick around in the bone marrow and keep churning out the virus-fighting molecules at more modest, but still detectable, levels. Though the life span of these long-lived B cells can vary, some studies have hinted that they’re capable of persisting as antibody factories for decades. Another population of immune cells, memory B cells, meanders around the body like sleeper agents, ready to resume making its antibodies whenever necessary. All of these B cells can continue to broaden and intensify their virus-vanquishing powers for months after a vaccine or pathogen leaves the body, in a sped-up form of antibody evolution. “The quality of antibodies in the body improves over time,” Bhattacharya said. “It takes way fewer of them to protect you.”
snip
but a lot of them will give in and get vaccinated when they realize they can't work, fly on an airplane, go to school, or do pretty much anything.
Darts is an idea though. 
