Your 'of its kind' phrasing does all the work, and it's not justified. Plenty of viruses don't create useful immunity, from flu to AIDS to the other seasonal coronaviruses, where immunity length is in the order of a few months...
It certainly confers immunity for a short period of time. How long that immunity lasts for is unknown, but it’s not unreasonable to start with an assumption of “at least a few months”.
There’s also not strong evidence that there are two sufficiently different strains. Viruses experience small, mostly meaningless, mutations with great frequency. The research talking about S and L types are actually just an arbitrary categorization of many different mutations of the virus.
Of course it's correct. If the immune system can't learn immunity from the full virus itself, virus fragments or a weakened relative won't suffice either.
As for developing a novel type of vaccine? Developing any vaccine within an acceptable timeframe would be a minor miracle. To expect a breakthrough like that is plain delusional.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of viruses we can't be immunized against. They either mutate too quickly, rendering any antibodies we develop moot, or they kill us too quickly. We don't have a great track record in developing vaccines for viruses either.
And to be useful they would have to be infected over the time the vaccine is effective to build longer-lasting immunity instead of losing the vaccine effectiveness over time completely, no? (Just a guess, I'm no expert.)
You must have read a different article than I did. It just talked about the production of antibodies. They help fight off infection but don't necessarily make you immune. The article also specifically mentions vulnerability to variants.
Yeah, and if you are complaining about the mild immune response caused be an attenuated (or even dead) virus, imagine how worse you would feel when infected by the active pathogen.
I guess I was being overly broad. I'm not an immunologist or anything.
I was thinking more of the kind of immunity one gets for something like chicken pox, where one childhood infection basically protects you for life, vs something like the seasonal flu which you can get again and again.
Now I don't know if the reason you keep getting the flu is because it mutates more rapidly than the chicken pox virus and you still remain immune to the particular strain you got infected with or if that initial immunity weakens over time.
"natural immunity provides decent protection" is a falsehood that exposes your intentionally limited definitions of "decent" and "protection." Again it is anything but decent behavior to expose your community to a contagious virus and it doesn't protect the person desiring immunity via infection from potential disability. Natural is even in question as the mechanism by which the body produces antibodies against the virus is the same. The RNA vaccine encodes a specific antigen, this antigen is presented to your natural immune system and it produces defenses like it would to any other antigen.
Surely it could be true that all population is immune to exposure to exactly half a virion well cooked with sauce, but such an information is pretty useless in any practical way, isn't it?
Half immunity in only certain circumstances is useless for all practical purposes.
reply