uch findings have implications for vaccine development, since the efficacy of a vaccine hinges on the idea that a dose of weakened or dead virus can prompt your body to generate antibodies that protect you from future infection. If those antibodies are fleeting, a vaccine’s protection would be fleeting too.
Short-lived antibodies also diminish hopes of achieving widespread or permanent herd immunity.
If antibodies can fade in some patients within weeks, and if just about everyone loses them after a few months, that would render any vaccine almost completely useless.
And if these findings are confirmed, we can pretty much forget about ever achieving “herd immunity”.
Instead, we are potentially facing a future in which COVID-19 will be with us permanently, and people will need to understand that there is a possibility that they will be able to get infected repeatedly.
Sadly, there is evidence that this is already starting to happen for some patients. In a recent article for Vox, a doctor in Washington D.C. named D. Clay Ackerly shared that one of his patients got infected with COVID-19 again three months after being infected the first time…
“Wait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection.
And in that same article, Dr. Ackerly explained that other doctors are starting to see similar cases….
Recent reports and conversations with physician colleagues suggest my patient is not alone. Two patients in New Jersey, for instance, appear to have contracted Covid-19 a second time almost two months after fully recovering from their first infection. Daniel Griffin, a physician and researcher at Columbia in New York, recently described a case of presumed reinfection on the This Week in Virology podcast.
If you stop and really think about what all of this means, it will chill you to the core.
It means that COVID-19 is never going away.
