Coronavirus: We won’t need another vaccine until 2022, expert says
Medical experts have also emphasized that not enough data is available. However, they have suggested that there might be reasons to be hopeful.
By ROSSELLA TERCATINA medical worker holds a syringe with Sputnik V (Gam-COVID-Vac) vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) before administering an injection at a vaccination centre in a shopping mall in Saint Petersburg, Russia February 24, 2021.(photo credit: REUTERS)
Israelis won’t need to get another coronavirus vaccine before 2022, Prof. Jonathan Halevy, president of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, told The Jerusalem Post Sunday.As Israel enjoys the effects of what Health Minister Yuli Edelstein defined as the“vaccination miracle” and an increasing number of activities have reopened under the green passport outline, the question of how long the inoculation’s protection will last becomes more relevant.The vaccination certificate expires after six months and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stressed several times that he is preparing the country for a situation where the whole population needs to be jabbed twice a year.Medical experts emphasize that the data are insufficient, but have suggested that there might be reasons to be hopeful.“No one knows the answer to the question of how long the vaccine will last, but we do have some circumstantial evidence to be more optimistic than to believe it will end in July,” Halevy said.“Looking at the level of antibodies in those who recovered, we do notice that it decreases within a few months, but we also know that there are very few mentioned cases of reinfection – a few hundred people out of over 800,000 who got infected – and the same is happening with people who received the vaccine.”He said that measurable antibodies are not the only factor that matters: “There is a question of cellular memory, of how lymphocytes react and more. For this reason, I stick my neck out and say that we will not need another vaccine before 2022.The only scenario in which another jab will be required earlier than that is the occurrence of an aggressive mutation that starts infecting people who already got inoculated. “But it does not look like this will happen,” he said.Halevy emphasized that he believes the inoculation against COVID-19 will eventually become similar to flu shots, which need to be administered every year.“The good news is that m-RNA vaccines are much easier to adapt than other technologies,” he explained, but advised medical experts to be humble, considering how much the pandemic has constantly surprised us.
Prof. Cyrille Cohen, director of the Immunotherapy Lab at Bar-Ilan University, also stressed caution.“It is very difficult to say how long the protection will last,” he said. “We know that in the case of other viruses from the corona family, it is not always durable. For example, the ones that cause common colds infect us multiple times in our lives.”The several hundred cases of reinfection in Israel show that reinfection is possible, and the issue of new variants adds another level of complexity. But the fact that in Israel reinfection is low – while in Brazil, where a variant developed, many contracted the virus twice – seems to show that as far as the original strain of the virus is concerned, recovery does offer a high level of protection, Cohen said.“The vaccine is able to generate similar antibodies and T-cells, so if I were to bet, I would say it is going to offer some protection for at least eight months, perhaps even more: for a year,” he said.“What we know about vaccines, for example the one for the flu, which is based on a different technology, is that they offer protection for about six or 12 months,” Cohen explained. “That is why at this point, our green passport expires in six months.”Another reason to be optimistic according to the immunologist is that no one who participated in the Pfizer clinical trial last summer appears to have been reinfected.“So far we have not heard about it. Even though we do not have the data yet, it seems that they are still protected,” said Cohen.“The big question remains... variants. And here we really do not know what will happen,” he said. “A likely scenario is that we will see partial immunity to certain variants, and that will have an impact on the need to be vaccinated again – not necessarily because of the length of the protection but rather because of the nature of the infection.”
