The fact that vaccine immunity has been waning quite sharply since the summer was basically obvious to anybody with a functioning brain who pays even the most cursory attention to pandemic statistics, but it’s useful to have it confirmed, in any case, by a proper scientific study, like the one published in the British Medical Journal yesterday:
The experts examined electronic health records for 80,057 adults (with a average age of 44) who had a PCR test between mid-May and September at least three weeks after their second vaccine injection.
None of the people in the sample had evidence of previous Covid-19 infection.
Of the group of 80,057 people, 7,973 (9.6%) had a positive test result.
They were then matched to people of the same age and ethnic group who tested negative in the same week.
The study found that the rate of positive results was found to rise in line with the time since people had had their second dose.
Across all age groups, 1.3% of people tested positive 21-89 days after a second dose, but this increased to 2.4% after 90-119 days; 4.6% after 120-149 days; 10.3% after 150-179 days; and 15.5% after 180 days or more.
What’s shocking, really, is not the speed at which immunity appears to wane, but the scale of that waning: A increase from 1.3% of people getting an infection to 15.5% of people getting an infection is the difference between no restrictions at all, at 1.3%, and something close to full lockdown panic at 15.5%. Guess which one we have been seeing in Ireland, of late.
Of course, this is not the full picture: The immunity which is being studied here is immunity against infection and transmission. The study does not paint any picture of waning immunity against hospitalisation, and death, which, the persistent global fall in death rates amongst the vaccinated suggests, endures much longer.
But it also poses a question: How much longer?
It stands to reason, after all, that immunity does not simply stop declining after three months. Logically, one might expect that over time, almost all residual effects of the vaccine might sharply decline. We have seen that initially with regards to protection against infection. We may begin to see it, in some unknown timeframe, with regards to protection from serious illness, too.
This, I think, explains some of the urgency around booster shots. The present covid situation in the west is unpleasant, but, even accounting for all the panic in the media, survivable. But if immunity against serious illness were to suddenly start waning at a rate comparable to the immunity against infection….. well, things might get ugly, very fast.
But even at that, understandable as the push for boosters might be, from a public policy point of view, there remains a problem: Though the evidence suggests that a booster shot drives a person’s antibodies much higher than the first two shots (which we previously reported on, here) and has prompted some rather excitable people to declare that Pfizer is actually a “three dose vaccine, not a two dose vaccine”, the fact remains that we have no evidence that booster immunity will not wane in time, too.
And some people say to that: Well, fine: You take a flu shot every year, don’t you?
Yes, we do. But the difference is that it is a different vaccine, for a different version of the virus, every single year. The Covid vaccines, by contrast, are the same vaccine, potentially being delivered over and over and over again. To my knowledge, there is no comparable example of a vaccine being delivered repeatedly.
In this context, vaccine hesitancy should not be hard to understand. Most people are reasonable, and rational, and willing to give the authorities and the establishment a chance. Ask them to take a vaccine, and they will say yes. Ask them to take a booster, and most of them will say yes. Ask them to take a fifth or sixth booster? Perhaps half of them might say yes.
In fact, it’s a reasonable assumption, at this point, that these vaccines will amount to a transitory, stop-gap solution. It simply defies reasonable belief to expect that Governments will continue to pay Pfizer and other companies billions annually for a vaccine which is much less effective than hoped, and will, at this rate, have to be regularly administered to people for all eternity. Society is not yet wrestling with that problem. At some point, though, we will have to confront it, because in the longer term, this strategy will be almost impossible to sustain. The vaccines do not work as it was hoped they might: So what’s next?