Will COVID-19 vaccines give lifelong immunity to the disease? What we know

Whether we would develop immunity to COVID-19, or how long that would last if we did, has been a mystery since the early months of the pandemic. However, two new studies are helping us better understand how our immune systems adapt to infection, and what that might mean for vaccination. The studies, published in May, find that infection-induced immunity might last months or longer. But experts believe vaccination may lengthen the duration of this immunity. Another important finding from both studies is that many people who have recovered from COVID-19 and later receive an mRNA vaccine (like the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine) may not need booster shots. Immunity in people with prior infection ‘should’ be effective against virus variants Both studies examined people exposed to the coronavirus roughly a year earlier. According to one study published in Nature, immune cells located in our bone marrow keep a “memory” of the coronavirus and are able to create...