Covid-19 Vaccines — Immunity, Variants, Boosters

[bennevisplace]

A broad sweep of a review article, just published in NEJM nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/N...

It covers the current Covid19 vaccines, how well they neutralise new variants of the virus, how their performance wanes in time, and in terms of both humoral and cellular immune responses.

The paper questions the current strategy of booster vaccinations every 4-6 months, notes that the latest omicron-specific vaccines are not much better at neutralising omicron than the early-developed vaccines, and argues that "the most important goal of Covid-19 vaccination should be to provide long-term protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death from current and future variants". And in its concluding remarks "It is therefore important for studies of Covid-19 vaccines and boosters to evaluate not only short-term neutralizing antibody titers but also durability of antibody responses, memory B-cell responses, and cross-reactive T-cell responses".

[Mijoed]

Interesting. Similar to Evusheld then.The resistance to buying Evusheld in the UK is supposed to be due to a reduced effectiveness against Omicron but, for those who don’t respond to the vaccines, Evusheld would at least reduce severe cases, hospitalisation, and death.

[bennevisplace in reply to Mijoed]

I suspect that UK government resistance to buying Evusheld is more about money, because resistance was there long before Omicron.

Evusheld may well reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death from Omicron infection, but only via neutralising antibodies and that's debated. Nobody is claiming Evusheld stimulates a protective T cell response like vaccines do.