Tag: much immunity
COVID Science Is Moving Backwards
Paul Sax is an infectious-disease physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. Even so, when Sax’s kids asked him whether they should get the updated COVID vaccine this fall, he wasn’t really sure what to tell them. His two children are in their 20s, healthy, and at no special risk of complications from disease. Each had recovered from COVID, and thus, he reasoned, had extra immunity on top of what they’d gotten from their prior shots. Another injection would
What Is America’s COVID Goal Now?
We know how this ends: The coronavirus becomes endemic, and we live with it forever. But what we don’t know—and what the U.S. seems to have no coherent plan for—is how we are supposed to get there. We’ve avoided the hard questions whose answers will determine what life looks like in the next weeks, months, and years: How do we manage the transition to endemicity? When are restrictions lifted? And what long-term measures do we keep, if any, when we
Should You Get a Vaccine If You Had COVID-19?
Immune cells can learn the vagaries of a particular infectious disease in two main ways. The first is bona fide infection, and it’s a lot like being schooled in a war zone, where any lesson in protection might come at a terrible cost. Vaccines, by contrast, safely introduce immune cells to only the harmless mimic of a microbe, the immunological equivalent of training guards to recognize invaders before they ever show their face. The first option might be more instructive