Immunity to Immune?

The variant is spreading widely, but won’t necessarily give us strong protection from new infections. 

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micron’s cross-country sweep won’t amount to nothing. Immunity will be raised, on average, and “we can still expect it to add friction” to any future path the virus takes, Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Chicago, told me. This may well be the last COVID surge that plays out in such a staggering fashion. We may, for a time, get a touch of reprieve. Even if a new antibody-dodging variant screeches onto the scene, there are “limitations to how this virus can evolve,” Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. By this point, perhaps many immune systems will have seen enough to anticipate what hijinks the virus lobs at us next.

Collective immunity is the key to ending a pandemic. But its building blocks start with each individual. By now we know that immunity against the coronavirus isn’t binary—and while no one can yet say exactly how much more protection Person A (triple vaxxed, recently infected) might have than Person B (twice infected, once vaxxed) or Person C (once infected, never vaxxed), we have figured out some of the broad trends that can toggle susceptibility up or down. Allowing for shades of gray, a person’s current immune status hinges on “the number of exposures [to the spike protein], and time since last exposure,” John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Infections and vaccinations add protection; time erodes it away.

Source:Reuters