COVID-19 vaccines are saving countless lives, but they can’t stop the chaos when a new, highly contagious mutant suddenly appears, leaving people wondering: Do we need boosters every few months? New vaccine formulation? A whole new way to shoot?

It’s far from settled, but with shooting still their main job, many pundits warn against setting the bar too high.

“We need to collectively rethink what the goal of vaccination is,” said Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “It’s unrealistic…to believe that any one kind of vaccination will permanently protect people from infection and from mildly symptomatic disease.”

If the goal is to prevent serious disease, “we may not need to make so many fine-tuning of the vaccine every time a new variant emerges.”

Viruses are inherently deformed as they mutate, and there is no way of knowing how bad the next variant will be. Daughter strains of omicron with their own unique mutations are already in vogue. Research is underway to create next-generation vaccines that may offer broader protection to future mutants — but they won’t be ready anytime soon.

Immediate solution: Arming today’s vaccines with more weapons would “reduce the chances of the virus mutating and generating new Greek letters, and then we have to worry,” says Jennifer Nuzzo of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security .

Why immunity is not perfect

The job of blocking infection falls to antibodies, which are formed after vaccination or with a previous episode of COVID-19 and can fight back the next time someone is exposed.

One problem: The mutation changes the appearance of the spike protein that coats the coronavirus, like a crook camouflaged to avoid capture. That’s why omicron is better at bypassing the first line of defense than earlier variants — its spike coating is harder to recognize by existing antibodies.

Also, the immune system is not designed to be on high alert all the time, so antibodies to fight infection can weaken over time. Months after receiving two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, people showed little protection against omicron infection — the result of weakened antibodies and mutant mutations.

Thankfully, different immune system soldiers called T cells are key to preventing infection from turning into serious disease—and this protection lasts longer, because T cells recognize other parts of the virus that are less susceptible to mutation.

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