To answer that question, expanded testing is needed that can determine levels of T immune cells
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are still scratching their head over a basic question: is there something they could measure to tell if people are protected?
That protection is short-lived. Antibody levels start dropping in a few months. Yet “we’re not seeing hospitalizations go up as fast as antibodies are going down,” says immunologist E. John Wherry of the University of Pennsylvania. “So what gives?” “The need for many doses is not practical at a population level. We need vaccines that give broader protection and last longer, and there’s important work ahead,” said Ofer Levy, one of the letter’s signees, in a recent Harvard Medical School press briefing. Levy directs the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and serves on the FDA’s Vaccines & Related Biologics Products Advisory Committee .
Research backs this up. In a study described in a January Cell paper, scientists at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology analyzed blood from 96 adults at various times after receiving a COVID vaccine. By six months after vaccination, levels of neutralizing antibodies had fallen substantially, whereas T cell responses remained strong even against Omicron.
In one study, scientists collected blood plasma from a set of macaques they had infected with SARS-CoV-2 and found that infusing the plasma into naive animals helped them resist subsequent infection. If the researchers depleted T cells from the plasma prior to transfer, those recipients fared worse. Evidence for protective T cells also comes from small human studies in which cancer patients with impaired antibody responses had better survival rates if they had greater numbers of T cells.
Getting those answers would require tracking thousands to tens of thousands of people, Wherry says. With that larger cohort, the analyses in each person could be much simpler—researchers could find out how many SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells people have and where in a range of T cell measures they fall.
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