vaccines also produce durable and persistent immune responses. Primary antibody titers wane, but the system itself remembers and can regenerate them when challenged.
Not really the anti-body count decays more quickly compared to that of a natural infection and does so dramatically especially for older people:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6....
This is the underlying reason that there is talk of boosters.
It is normal for antibodies to decline after an immune response, it doesn't mean the immunity is gone, the immune system remembers how to produce them when needed.
The paper you link actually says that the memory B-cell populations appear to be maintained after the waning of the antibodies. B-cells are the cells that remembers and creates antibodies in response to an antigen (like the spike protein on the surface of the virus).
No one is shilling vaccines. We use the "wonder of our natural immune system" effectively with the vaccine without being a public health risk to everyone around us by skipping it.
Interestingly, we're putting unnatural selection pressure on the viruses by leveraging vaccines that are leaky, this has in at least one example been shown to produce a deadlier pathogen for unvaccinated. So, maybe you had ought to be a little more skeptical about your risk assessments when the data isn't yet in and may never be until it is. And as for the philosophical conundrum, I'd posit that it's far safer to maintain the known function than it is the novel, keep the defaults. We've of course more or less crossed the Rubicon.
This is a pretty bad take. No vaccine has 100% coverage. Most of the time we're talking about 85-90% protection rate, with some low possibility of mild infectious contagion.
The particularly ignorant take on your part is ignoring 1918 to 1919 change in that flu. It 'naturally' became far more deadly with no vaccine needed.
Right. Abstractly viruses find a sweet spot between transmission rate and lethality to host. Too lethal and it won’t spread very far. However, in practical terms there is a lot more room for something like COVID to be far more damaging and still spread just like it has been or more. All of the immunity we now have and the particular nature and quality of it will certainly impact what the virus does when mutating. If it really can breakthrough vaccinated populations it’s going to change how it evolves. That is a lot of ifs, buts and maybes. The real world data just is t backing up a lot of these weak claims folks are making. In practical terms the vaccines work and do their job. There is a lot of interesting observations to make and we are in the middle of a great experiment of sorts, so we should be very data driven in my opinion.
Bit of an overreaction. Stating that the testing period of 15 weeks is, in your opinion, too short to determine long-term immunity would’ve sufficed as comment.
No need to be uncivil to eachother when you don’t agree.
The requirement for booster shots may be for increasing immunity to variants, not the original virus. If you survived the original virus and got an immunity out of it you are just as vulnerable to variants as anyone who got the vaccine.
vaccines also produce durable and persistent immune responses. Primary antibody titers wane, but the system itself remembers and can regenerate them when challenged.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107714 for contra "but muh boosters", which i suspect is what's helping me collect downvotes.