Little to report on the research front. It is obvious that from a science point of view, it's "problem solved" mostly. Coronavirus experts like Drosten will continue to work on the topic, and of course there's a bunch of money to be made from developing a "covid pill" and second generation vaccines, but the opportunistic storm on the topic by each and every researcher trying to get a paper published seems to be over.
We got some minor news on vaccination, though. Most of them pretty good.
Let's keep in mind there's two kinds of immunity we look at here: Firstly, functional immunity, meaning if you get in contact with the virus, your immune system kicks it ass and you don't suffer any or only minor symptoms. Second, sterilizing immunity, meaning if you get in contact with the virus, your immune system blocks it off entirely, and you never even get infected.
First piece of news: Following up on the initial trial of the two mRNA vaccines, we see a
small drop in protection against mild disease ("any symptoms") after six months: While the initial trial read out at 95-ish percent for both BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, we now stand at 84% and 90%, respectively. It is currently unclear whether this drop is
actually driven by a loss of vaccine efficacy, or rather by the occurance of mutations (the trial was run in the US, where several partial immune escape E484K mutations were circulating before being wiped out by Delta).
Efficacy against severe disease does not seem to be impacted, with the current 97% figure being within the confidence interval of the original 99% readout.
Second:
Even those unlucky enough to catch covid while being vaccinated are 78% less likely to spread the virus than an unvaccinated person. This data comes with the caveat of being pre-Delta, though. With Delta being 40% more infectious than Alpha, maybe this number will drop to 70%. Or maybe not.
Third:
Scientists are zeroing in on the "correlate of protection", the amount of antibodies needed to provide sterilizing immunity. This is important work since once we not only know
that there is a direct relation between antibody levels and sterilizing immunity, but can put a number behind it, you can tell if a vaccine (a new one or an variant update) works by lab tests, without the need to run a phase 3 trial.
Fourth: The fact that T-Cell production begins almost immediately after vaccination might explain why
functional immunity sets in even with near-zero antibody level. Understanding functional immunity better helps us with deciding whether everyone needs booster shots, or whether only those super vulnerable (or working with them) should get them.
All in all, covid, as Cambridge's Ravi Gupta (a harsh critic of the Johnson administration, so don't put him off for political reasons) put it, is turning from a medical and research challenge into a political problem: With no vaccine for small kids (yet) and significant groups of vaccine refusers, how do we deal with rising infection numbers, as the vast majority of people will be well-protected by vaccination?