No argument, but why do some antibodies stay, while others are only short term? It would be great if the covid antibodies were permanent.
That’s a good question. I think for stable viruses like polio, small pox, measles, chicken pox, etc. it’s a good investment in the body’s energy to continue producing those antibodies. Each type of antibody is produced by a separate population of T cells. For every disease that you have immunity to, there’s a population of T cells producing the antibodies. Your body must continuously renew and maintain this population.
For diseases with unstable viruses like those causing colds and flus, nature seems to have figured out that there’s no benefit keeping a population of T cells at the ready, so maintains them only long enough not to get repeatedly infected over and over in the same epidemic. Nature is elegantly efficient at energy use.
What I’m reading is that the covid virus is more stable than typical colds and flu virii, (in the parts of the genome that control virulence) but may or may not be as stable as some of the viruses above. It’s still unknown at this point, but there are indicators that up to a year immunity is present in some people.
Of course it’s only been around a year or so, so knowledge is limited.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro