Immunologists have raced to work out how to protect against multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2. Their research has yielded a wealth of insights and a few surprises.
With that decline came a drop in protection. The shots, which became widely available in some countries as early as December 2020, showed impressive effectiveness initially. But by July 2021, reports began to surface of breakthrough infections. Data from Israel, which had launched an aggressive vaccination campaign using the Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA vaccine, suggested that this vaccine’s protection against infection dropped from 95% to just 39% over the course of 5 months .
. But vaccines have retained their ability to prevent serious illness. Protection from infection might be waning, but protection against hospitalization seems to be holding up. “You’re probably going to have protective immunity for years,” Crotty says.Immune memory depends on more than just antibodies. Even when antibody levels drop, memory B cells can recognize a return invader, divide, and quickly start churning out antibodies to fight it.
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