Vaccines
This article has a graph of AZ and Pfizer’s effectiveness over time for old folks. It’s not pretty (but remember that they used a short dose interval, and Canada mostly used a long interval).
Even for younger people, it’s not great news:
This preprint says that people who have a spare tire around their middle (waist for women >80 cm, for men >94 cm) have 2.44x more of a drop in antibody levels over time than svelte people.
There’s a fight going on in the USA about boosters. President Biden said they were going to give everybody boosters, even before any vax providers had submitted an application, let alone gotten FDA approval. This opinion piece (which was written by, among others, the FDA vaccine director and deputy director, who quit in protest two weeks ago) in The Lancet says that’s premature.
Disease
This preprint says that they found killer T cells which could kill SARS-CoV-2 in the tonsils of people who were COVID-naive (i.e. had never had COVID-19 or a vax). (Presumably they’d had one of the “common cold” coronaviruses.) If some people have COVID-killing T cells and others don’t, that could help to explain the wild difference in COVID-19 outcomes.
Another preprint said that COVID-naive people who had “common cold” helper T cells which could kill SARS-CoV-2 generated more SARS-CoV-2-specific helper-T cells and antibodies than other COVID-naive people.
Transmission
This preprint from the UK found that daily rapid testing of schoolchildren worked slightly better than having contacts self-isolate.
Recommended Reading
This article is about the history of mRNA vaccines. It’s framed slightly as, “okay, who’s going to win the Nobel Prize for mRNA vaccines?”