Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The findings may help put to rest lingering fears that protection against the virus will be short-lived.
I think the most hopeful thing that i read this week was a new york times article that was based on research uh that you could find in the journal nature and it took a look at immunity to the coronavirus and the possibility that it it lasts at least a year possibly a lifetime
And uh you know i want to take a i want to dive deeper into this because it involves all these different things including b cells and bone marrow so when you read these studies tell me what information you were able to glean from it
Yeah so this this is great i mean i i have my phd in immunology and no one wanted to talk about immunology until about a year and a half ago so i’m very excited that people now care and people should care um and this was a really interesting question that was
Being asked and when someone has an experience an immunological experience you catch a virus you you get vaccinated and your immune system sees something how long do you remember that and there are two types of memory cells there’s short-lived ones that last for only a matter of months
And then there’s long-lived memory or plasma cells that end up in the bone marrow that can stay there for years upon years and what this study did and it’s not easy to do but they were able to examine and detect these plasma long-lived memory cells in the bone marrows of people
Who had experienced infection or who had been vaccinated so this is encouraging because i think a lot of people hear the oh i see the vaccines you know six months and then the idea is they fall off a cliff that’s not clear i like to say six months and going
Strong it’s like a car commercial or truck commercial and maybe we’re hearing even longer i know the pharmaceutical companies would love this to be a yearly shot and that’s fine um as long as it’s at least a yearly shot and it may even be less than a yearly shot and particularly in
Adolescence with really robust they may only need one shot and it may be a really long time for that next shot but i always like to draw the distinction this is great this is immunology but what we really want to know is actual real world protection and we’re following that so right now
We’re incredibly optimistic um but we’ll find over time is there a point at which that immune protection drops to the point that it makes sense to get another shot and i do want to point out they also took a look at mild uh infections you know people who
Who didn’t have you know those worst case scenarios as well yeah and i think that’s important because a lot of people right they go out they want to check their serology they want to do their blood test that tells you about how much antibodies are in the circulation
But that doesn’t tell you about all the the cells that are in reserve ready to jump in in a you know short few day notice if you get exposed and so that’s not available vaccination now probably the people that have the longest duration of protection and the highest level are people who
Had a natural infection and then went ahead and got vaccinated great data now on vaccinated people having incredible protection even against all these variants that are now entering our country but people with natural infection that might be a different story initially you’re at lower risk not as lower risk as a vaccinated person
But we are seeing breakthrough infections in those individuals and those may be the infectious in individuals that drive the variants in our country so still encouraging those folks to get vaccinated
