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Scientists blast U.S. transfer as untimely

Scientists blast U.S. move as premature

A nurse administers a COVID-19 booster shot to Joe Rigdon at a vaccination site in Eastmonte Park, Altamonte Springs.

Paul Hennessy | LightRocket | Getty Images

Scientists sharply criticized the Biden administration’s push to widely distribute Covid-19 vaccine booster shots in the U.S. next month, saying the data provided by federal health officials this week wasn’t compelling enough to recommend third shots to most of the American population right now.

U.S. health leaders say they are preparing to offer booster shots to all eligible Americans beginning the week of Sept. 20. The plan, outlined Wednesday by CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health officials, calls for a third dose eight months after people get their second shot of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.

They cited three new studies, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that showed their protection against Covid diminished over several months. One study in New York from May 3 through July 25 showed that vaccine protection against infection dropped from around 92% to 80%. Another study by the Mayo Clinic showed that Pfizer’s vaccine efficacy fell from around 76% to 42% while Moderna’s declined from 86% to 76%.

“Taken together, you can see that while the exact percentage of vaccine effectiveness over time differs depending on the cohort and settings study, the data consistently demonstrate a reduction of vaccine effectiveness against infection over time,” Walensky told reporters during a White House Covid press briefing.

But scientists and other health experts said the data they cited wasn’t compelling, characterizing the administration’s push for boosters as premature. While the data did suggest there was a reduction in protection against mild and moderate disease, the two-dose vaccines still held up well against severe disease and hospitalizations, scientists said.

For example, the New York study released by the CDC showed there were 9,675 infections among fully vaccinated adults, compared with 38,505 infections among unvaccinated adults during the period examined. Among the fully vaccinated people who were infected, 1,271 were hospitalized, accounting for roughly 15% of all Covid hospitalizations.

“People are still highly protected against severe disease, hospitalization, and death. This is what vaccines are supposed to do,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “If we start seeing significant upticks of more severe disease and hospitalizations in vaccinated people, that would be a signal to consider boosters.”

The body’s immune system is complex, Durbin said. While the presence of antibodies induced by the vaccine may decline, resulting in a rise in breakthrough infections, the body has other mechanisms, like T cells, that may protect someone from getting seriously sick, she said.

“The data are showing that yes, we are seeing breakthrough infections but, the infections are mild or moderate colds,” she said.

To be sure, federal health officials said the vaccines are still holding up against severe disease over time, even as their ability to prevent infections declines. They said, based on their latest assessment, “the current protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death could diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout.”

There are some groups in the U.S. who would benefit from a third dose right now, according to Dr. Archana Chatterjee, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

Data does support the need for booster doses primarily among those who are moderate to severely immunocompromised, Chatterjee said. Federal health officials on Friday approved giving booster shots to such people – which include cancer and HIV patients and people who have had organ transplants – after data suggested they don’t produce an adequate immune response after getting two doses.

As of now, “breakthrough infections in the general public tend to be asymptomatic or mild,” she said.

People who are 65 or older or living in a long-term care facility may also benefit from a booster shot, said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto,

Israel, a country U.S. officials have also cited in their push for boosters, has begun giving out third doses to the elderly after new data showed a reduction in the effectiveness of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine against severe illness among people 65 and older who were fully vaccinated in January or February.

“Do we all need a third dose of a vaccine right now? No, we don’t. Do some people need a third dose of a vaccine right now? Yes. Will we need a third dose of a vaccine in the near future? Maybe,” Bogoch said in a phone interview.

Dr. Priya Sampathkumar, an epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic, agreed, saying a booster could be needed for the general public in the future, but not right now. “There isn’t enough data to support the third booster for all at this point,” she said.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, said federal health officials should put their focus elsewhere: the unvaccinated, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Earlier this month, the WHO asked wealthy nations to stop distributing booster shots until at least the end of September to give poorer countries the chance to vaccinate their populations with the first rounds of shots. 

Shortly after the U.S. announced its booster plan, the international agency condemned wealthy nations that support boosters for the general public.

“Boosting the entire U.S. population while poor people are dying in poor countries is tone-deaf and is widely viewed as uncaring,” Gostin said. “It’s also a slap in the face to WHO after it called for a booster moratorium.”

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy defended the administration’s booster plan on CNBC on Wednesday, saying health officials decided to give boosters to the general public at the eight-month mark as a way “to stay ahead of this virus.”

“We are making plans now, because No. 1, you’ve got to plan ahead, but two, we wanted the public to know what we were seeing in the data, in our effort to be transparent and open with the public,” Murthy told “The News with Shepard Smith.”

During a White House briefing Tuesday, press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration believes it can boost the American population while ensuring the rest of the world gets vaccinated.

“We believe that is a false choice. We can do both,” Psaki said, adding that the U.S. is contributing more vaccine doses than any other nation to fight Covid across the globe. “We will continue to be the arsenal for vaccines around the world. We also have enough supply and had long planned enough supply should a booster be needed for the eligible population.”

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Covid Lambda Variant of Peru: What Scientists Know

Covid Lambda Variant of Peru: What Scientists Know

Viruses develop. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is no exception. So the emergence of variants is no surprise, and not every new genetic mutation poses a serious threat.

But in recent weeks a growing drum of news coverage has started to sound the alarm about lambda, a variant first discovered in Peru late last year. The variant, initially known as C.37, quickly spread in parts of South America. On June 14, the World Health Organization classified it as an “interesting variant,” which essentially means that experts suspect it could be more dangerous than the original strain.

The prevalence of lambda and its mutations, which are similar to those found in several other highly contagious or worrying variants, make it worth watching, scientists said. But much remains unknown and it is not yet clear how high the risk is.

“I think part of the interest is just due to the fact that there is a new variant that has a new name,” said Nathaniel Landau, a microbiologist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine who studies the new coronavirus variants .

“But I don’t think there is any more cause for concern than before we knew about this variant,” added Dr. Landau added. So far, there is no evidence that Lambda will displace Delta, the highly transmissible variant that now dominates most of the world. “There is no reason to believe that this is now anything worse than Delta.”

Pablo Tsukayama, a microbiologist at Cayetano Heredia University in Peru who documented the creation of lambda, agreed. Latin America has “limited capacity” for genomic surveillance and laboratory follow-up studies of new variants, he said. This has created an information gap that is fueling concerns about lambda. “I don’t think it will be worse than anyone else we already have,” he said. “We know so little that it lends itself to a lot of speculation.”

According to a June 15 update by the WHO, lambda had been reported in 29 countries, territories or areas by mid-June. The variant had been detected in 81 percent of the coronavirus samples sequenced in Peru since April, and 31 percent of them in Chile so far, the agency said.

The variant accounts for less than 1 percent of samples sequenced in the United States, according to GISAID, an archive for viral genomic data. Isolated cases have been reported in some other countries.

The variant contains eight notable mutations, including seven in the gene for the spike protein found on the surface of the virus. Some of these mutations come in other flavors and could make the virus more contagious or help bypass the body’s immune response.

But big questions remain unanswered. It’s not yet clear whether lambda is more transmissible than other variants, whether it causes more serious illnesses, or makes vaccines less effective.

Updated

July 11, 2021 at 1:57 p.m. ET

“We don’t have a lot of information compared to the other variants,” says Ricardo Soto-Rifo, a virologist at the University of Chile who studied lambda.

Preliminary laboratory studies that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals are cause for concern and reassurance. In these studies, research teams led by Dr. Soto-Rifo and Dr. Landau found that antibodies against Lambda induced by the Pfizer, Moderna and CoronaVac vaccines are less effective than against the original strain, but are still able to neutralize the virus.

The results suggest that these vaccines should still work against lambda, the scientists said. In addition, antibodies aren’t the body’s only defense against the virus; even if they are less strong against lambda, other components of the immune system, such as T cells, can also offer protection.

“This decrease in neutralizing antibodies does not mean that the vaccine is less effective,” said Dr. Soto-Rifo. Real-world studies of how well the vaccines hold up against the variant are still needed, he said.

The researchers also reported that, like several other variants, lambda binds more tightly to cells than the original strain of the virus, making it potentially more transmissible.

Though many questions remain unanswered, Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said that he doesn’t find lambda as worrying as Delta and doesn’t expect it to become as dominant worldwide.

“Lambda has been around for a while and it has barely made its way into the US, for example, compared to, for example, Gamma” – the variant first identified in Brazil – “which did pretty well here.” He added, “I think it did entire focus should be on Delta. “

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Scientists Press Case In opposition to the Covid Lab Leak Concept

Scientists Press Case Against the Covid Lab Leak Theory

In the recent debate on the origins of the coronavirus, a group of scientists this week presented an overview of scientific findings that they believe show that natural spread from animals to humans is a far more likely cause of the pandemic than a laboratory incident.

The scientists refer, among other things, to a recent report showing that markets in Wuhan, China, had sold live animals susceptible to the virus, including civet cats and raccoon dogs, in the two years before the pandemic began. They observed the striking similarity of the appearance of Covid-19 to other viral diseases caused by natural spillovers and pointed to a variety of newly discovered viruses in animals that are closely related to the virus that caused the new pandemic.

The back and forth among scientists takes place as intelligence agencies work with a deadline for the end of summer to give President Biden an assessment of the origin of the pandemic. There is now disagreement among intelligence officials as to which scenario is more likely for a viral origin.

The new paper, which went online on Wednesday but has yet to be published in a scientific journal, was written by a team of 21 virologists. Four of them also worked on a 2020 paper in Nature Medicine that largely ruled out the possibility that laboratory manipulation could turn the virus into a human pathogen.

In the new paper, the scientists provided further evidence that the virus was spilled from an animal host outside of a laboratory. Joel Wertheim, a virologist at the University of California, San Diego and co-author, said a key point in support of natural origin is the “uncanny similarity” between the Covid and SARS pandemics. Both viruses appeared in China in late autumn, he said, with the first known cases emerging near animal markets in cities – Wuhan in the case of Covid and Shenzen in the case of SARS.

In the SARS epidemic, the new paper suggests that scientists will eventually trace its origin back to viruses that infected bats far from Shenzen.

Due to the spread of viruses similar to the new coronavirus in Asia, Dr. Wertheim and his colleagues predict that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 will also be a long way from Wuhan.

Since first surfacing in the final months of 2019, the viral culprit of this pandemic has not yet been found in any animal.

In May, another team of 18 scientists published a letter arguing that the possibility of a laboratory leak must be taken seriously due to insufficient evidence of a natural origin for the coronavirus or a leak from a laboratory. Wuhan, where the pandemic was first documented, is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, WIV for short, where researchers have been studying coronaviruses from bats for years.

One of the signatories of the May 2021 letter, Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, co-authored the new paper, which advocates natural spillover.

He said his views evolved as more information emerged. Among other reasons for Dr. Worobey’s shift was the growing evidence of the Huanan animal market in Wuhan. When the pandemic first appeared in Wuhan, Chinese officials tested hundreds of samples from animals sold in the market and did not find the coronavirus in any of them.

But last month, a team of researchers presented an inventory of 47,381 animals from 38 species that were sold in Wuhan’s markets between May 2017 and November 2019. This included species such as civets and raccoon dogs, which can act as intermediate hosts for coronaviruses.

Dr. Worobey called this study “a groundbreaking paper”.

He also pointed out the timing of the earliest cases of Covid in Wuhan. “The Huanan market is right in the epicenter of the outbreak, with later cases radiating into space from there,” said Dr. Worobey in an email.

“No early cases cluster near the WIV, which has been the focus of most speculation about a possible lab escape,” he said.

However, other scholars say that such arguments are speculative and that the new review is mostly a repetition of what is already known.

“Basically, it really boils down to an argument that because almost all previous pandemics have been natural in origin, it must be,” said David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who organized the May Letter to Science.

He noted that he does not reject the natural origin hypothesis as a plausible explanation for the pandemic jump. But dr. Relman believes the new paper is “a selective sample of outcomes to be used to argue one side”.

Dr. In their new paper, Worobey and his colleagues also presented evidence against the notion that so-called gain-of-function research, which intentionally changes the function of a virus, may have played a role in the pandemic. The researchers argue that the coronavirus genome does not have mandatory signatures of manipulation. And the diversity that coronavirus scientists have discovered in Asian bats could serve as an evolutionary source for Covid-19.

But Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and a staunch critic of attempts to reduce the likelihood of a laboratory leak, said this was a straw man argument.

Dr. Ebright said it was possible that a WIV laboratory worker caught the coronavirus on a field expedition to examine bats or while processing a virus in the laboratory. The new paper, he argued, did not address such possibilities.

“The review does not advance the discussion,” said Dr. Ebright.

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In search of Solutions on Covid, U.F.O.s and Sicknesses, Spy Businesses Flip to Scientists

Seeking Answers on Covid, U.F.O.s and Illnesses, Spy Agencies Turn to Scientists

But the recent challenges facing intelligence agencies have required a different range of scientific expertise, including some areas in which the authorities have invested fewer resources over the years.

“This is a really interesting moment where national security interests have shifted from some of the Cold War interests,” said Sue Gordon, a former top intelligence official. “The priorities are changing now.”

Given not only the immediate unresolved security issues, but also the longer-term challenge of improving the gathering of information on climate change, Avril D. Haines, director of the National Intelligence Service, has urged authorities to provide undergraduate and postgraduate students with extensive scientific knowledge.

“The DNI believes that the changing threat landscape requires intelligence agencies to develop and invest in a talented workforce, including those with scientific and technological backgrounds,” said Matt Lahr, a spokesman for Ms. Haines. “Without this know-how, we will not only not be competitive, but also not master the challenges we are facing today.”

Officials are also trying to make wider use of existing initiatives. For example, Ms. Haines’ office has been more aggressively questioning its Science and Technology Expert Group, a group of about 500 scientists who volunteer to help intelligence agencies answer scientific problems.

Officials have asked these scientists about coronavirus mutations, as well as climate change and the availability of natural resources. While the experts in the expert group do not conduct intelligence analysis, their answers can help such analysts within the agencies draw more precise conclusions, intelligence officials said.

In other cases, the efforts to bring in external expertise are new.

During the Trump administration, the State Department hired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to investigate Havana Syndrome. The report concluded that a microwave weapon was a likely cause of many of the incidents but was hampered in part due to a lack of access to information; Not all material collected by the secret services was made available to scientists, officials said.

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Coaching the Subsequent Era of Indigenous Information Scientists

Training the Next Generation of Indigenous Data Scientists

“Native DNA is so sought after that people are looking for proxy data, and one of the big proxy data is the microbiome,” said Yracheta. “If you are a Native, you need to consider all of these variables if you are to protect your people and culture.”

In a presentation at the conference, Joslynn Lee, a member of the Navajo, Laguna Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo Nations and a biochemist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, shared her experience of tracking changes in microbial communities in rivers that drained mine wastewater Silverton, Colorado, discontinued. Dr. Lee also provided practical tips on planning a microbial analysis, from taking a sample to processing it.

Rebecca Pollet, a biochemist and member of the Cherokee Nation, took a data science career panel on how many mainstream pharmaceuticals were developed based on traditional knowledge and plant medicine of the indigenous people. The anti-malarial drug quinine, for example, was developed from the bark of a species of cinchona that the Quechua people used as medicine in the past. Dr. Pollet, who studies the effects of drugs and traditional foods on the gut microbiome, asked, “How do we honor this traditional knowledge and compensate for what has been covered up?”

One participant, Lakota Elder Les Ducheneaux, added that he believed that medicine derived from traditional knowledge mistakenly removed the prayers and rituals that traditionally accompanied treatment, making the medicine less effective. “You have to constantly balance the scientific part of medicine with the cultural and spiritual part of your job,” he said.

During the IndigiData conference, attendees also discussed ways to manage their own data to serve their communities.

Mason Grimshaw, data scientist and board member of Indigenous in AI, spoke about his research on language data at the International Wakashan AI Consortium. The consortium, led by engineer Michael Running Wolf, is developing automatic speech recognition AI for Wakashan languages, a family of endangered languages ​​spoken by multiple First Nations communities. The researchers believe that automatic speech recognition models can preserve the fluency of the Wakashan languages ​​and revive their use by future generations.

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Scientists Report Earliest Identified Coronavirus Circumstances in 5 US States

Scientists Report Earliest Known Coronavirus Cases in Five US States

When did the coronavirus arrive in the US?

The first infection was confirmed on January 21, 2020 in a Washington state resident who had recently returned from Wuhan, China. Shortly afterwards, experts concluded that the virus had been in the country for weeks.

A study published Tuesday provides new evidence: Based on an analysis of blood tests, scientists identified seven people in five states who may have been infected long before the first confirmed cases in those states. The results suggest that the virus was already circulating in Illinois, for example, on December 24, 2019, although the first case in that state was confirmed a month later.

But the new study is flawed, some experts said: it did not adequately address the possibility that the antibodies were against coronaviruses, which cause colds, and the results could be a quirk of the tests used. In addition, the researchers did not have any travel information for any of the patients, which may have helped explain the test results.

“This is an interesting paper because it raises the idea that everyone is believing that there were infections that went undiagnosed,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

But the small number of samples that tested positive made it difficult to be sure that these were real cases of infection and not just a methodological error. “It’s hard to tell what is a real signal and what is not,” he said.

However, if the results are correct, they reinforce the notion that bad testing in the US missed most of the cases in the first few weeks of the pandemic.

“You can’t see what’s going on without testing,” said Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “In those earlier months, some of those states that we didn’t suspect had a lot of infections.”

It is no surprise that there may have been undocumented cases at the start of the pandemic, said Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Experts “already knew this was the case when they looked at trends in excess mortality and hospital admissions,” she said.

The latest model from Dr. Cobey estimated that there were about 10,000 infections in Illinois as of March 1, 2020. “Given the dire state of the tests, there was no doubt we missed the earliest broadcast,” she added.

In the study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Dr. Althoff and her colleagues took blood samples from more than 24,000 people. They found nine people who donated blood between January 2 and March 18 last year and who appeared to have antibodies to the coronavirus.

Updated

June 15, 2021, 9:21 p.m. ET

Seven of the samples were from blood donated in their states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Massachusetts prior to the date of initial diagnosis. The results agree with those of another study that identified coronavirus antibodies in donated blood as early as mid-December 2019.

Participants were enrolled in a long-term project by the National Institutes of Health called All of Us, which aims to involve one million people in the United States to increase minority representation in research. Only about half of the study participants were white.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the virus would have infected very few people. A low prevalence increases the likelihood that an antibody test will incorrectly identify a sample as an antibody when it doesn’t, said Dr. Hensley – a false positive.

The researchers tried to minimize this possibility by using two antibody tests in a row. The first test identified 147 samples as possible antibodies to the coronavirus; the second reduced that number to nine.

The team also analyzed 1,000 blood samples from the 2018/19 cold and flu season and found none that tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus.

“It is still very possible that some of these are false positives,” said Dr. Josh Denny, CEO of All of Us. But “the fact that they would all be false positives seems pretty unlikely with what we’ve done.”

The researchers said they planned to contact participants to inquire about travel history and would continue to analyze additional samples to estimate when the coronavirus hit American shores.

“The exact month it likely came to the US is still unknown,” said Dr. Althoff. “Right now, it’s essentially a puzzle, and our study is only part of that puzzle.”

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NIH scientists say they could have discovered a promising new oral antiviral drug

NIH scientists say they may have found a promising new oral antiviral drug

Alex Raths | Getty Images

Scientists may have found promising new treatment for Covid-19 after an experimental oral antiviral drug demonstrated the ability to prevent the coronavirus from replicating, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday, citing a new study.

The drug called TEMPOL can reduce Covid-19 infections by interfering with an enzyme that the virus needs to make copies of itself once it’s in human cells, which could potentially limit the severity of the disease, des researchers said NIH. The drug was tested in a live virus cell culture experiment.

“We urgently need additional effective, accessible treatments for COVID-19,” wrote Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the NIH, in a statement. “An oral drug that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from replicating would be an important tool in reducing the severity of the disease.”

The results were published in the journal Science.

While vaccines have been incredibly useful in containing Covid-19 cases in the United States and other parts of the world, scientists say treatments are still badly needed for those who contract the virus.

According to the Johns Hopkins University, the US reported an average of around 16,300 infections per day on Wednesday. Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir is the only drug that has received full US approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of Covid and that must be administered intravenously in a hospital.

Pfizer, who worked with German drug maker BioNTech to develop the first approved Covid-19 vaccine in the United States, is also developing an oral drug against Covid that can be taken at home at the first signs of illness. The researchers hope the drug will prevent the disease from getting worse and prevent hospital stays. It started with an early trial in March.

The NIH researchers said they intend to conduct additional preliminary studies and look for ways to evaluate the drug in a clinical study on Covid.

The results of the study are “hopeful,” said Dr. Tracey Rouault, another NIH officer who led the study.

“However, clinical trials are needed to determine whether the drug will be effective in patients, especially early on in the disease process when the virus begins to replicate.”

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Scientists Don’t Need to Ignore the Wuhan ‘Lab Leak’ Concept, Regardless of No New Proof

Scientists Don’t Want to Ignore the Wuhan ‘Lab Leak’ Theory, Despite No New Evidence

As scientists find more animal coronaviruses, they can recognize more and more pieces of SARS-CoV-2 spread out among them. Researchers have also been able to reconstruct some of the evolutionary steps by which SARS-CoV-2 evolved into a potential human pathogen while it was still infecting animals.

This pattern is probably one that’s been followed by many viruses that are now major burdens on human health. H.I.V., for example, most likely had its origin in the early 1900s, when hunters in West Africa got infected with viruses that infected chimpanzees and other primates.

But some scientists thought it was too soon to conclude something similar happened in the case of SARS-CoV-2. After all, the coronavirus first came to light in the city of Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers study dozens of strains of coronaviruses collected in caves in southern China.

Still, that a top lab studying this family of viruses happens to be located in the same city where the epidemic emerged could very well be a coincidence. Wuhan is an urban center larger than New York City, with a steady flow of visitors from other parts of China. It also has many large markets dealing in wildlife brought from across China and beyond. When wild animals are kept in close quarters, viruses have an opportunity to jump from species to species, sometimes resulting in dangerous recombinations that can lead to new diseases.

That lab’s research began after another coronavirus led to the SARS epidemic in 2002. Researchers soon found relatives of that virus, called SARS-CoV, in bats, as well as civet cats, which are sold in Chinese markets. The discovery opened the eyes of scientists to all the animal coronaviruses with the potential of spilling over the species line and starting a new pandemic.

Virologists can take many measures to reduce the risk of getting infected with the viruses they study. But over the years, some accidents have happened. Researchers have gotten sick, and they’ve infected others with their experimental viruses.

In 2004, for example, a researcher at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing got infected with the coronavirus that causes SARS. She passed it on to others, including her mother, who died from the infection.

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Immunity to the Coronavirus Might Persist for Years, Scientists Discover

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Persist for Years, Scientists Find

Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, and improves over time, especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The results could help dispel lingering fears that protection from the virus will be short-lived.

Taken together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and were later immunized don’t need boosters. However, vaccinated people, who most likely never got infected, need the shots, as do a minority who were infected but did not evoke a robust immune response.

Both reports looked at people who had been exposed to the coronavirus about a year earlier. Cells that hold a memory for the virus remain in the bone marrow and can produce antibodies when needed, according to one of the studies published in Nature on Monday.

The other study, which is also being examined for publication in Nature, found that these so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen at least 12 months after the initial infection.

“The publications are consistent with the growing body of literature suggesting that immunity induced by infection and vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lasting,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research.

The studies could allay fears that immunity to the virus is temporary, as is the case with coronaviruses, which cause colds. But these viruses change significantly every few years, said Dr. Hensley. “The reason we become repeatedly infected with frequent coronaviruses over the course of life could have a lot more to do with the variation in these viruses than with immunity,” he said.

In fact, memory B cells, which were produced in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and boosted by vaccination, are so effective that they even thwart variants of the virus and nullify the need for boosters, according to Michel Nussenzweig, immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, who led the study on memory maturation.

“People who have been infected and vaccinated really have a great response, a great set of antibodies, because they keep developing their antibodies,” said Dr. Nut branch. “I assume they will last a long time.”

The result may not only apply to vaccine protection, as immune memory is likely to be organized differently after immunization than after natural infection.

That means people who haven’t had Covid-19 and have been vaccinated may need a booster shot, said Dr. Nut branch. “We’ll know something like that very, very soon,” he said.

When a virus first appears, B cells multiply quickly and produce antibodies in large quantities. Once the acute infection has subsided, a small number of cells take their place in the bone marrow and steadily pump out modest amounts of antibodies.

To study the memory B cells specific to the new coronavirus, researchers led by Ali Ellebedy of Washington University in St. Louis analyzed the blood of 77 people at three-month intervals, starting about a month after they were infected the coronavirus. Only six of the 77 had been hospitalized for Covid-19; The rest had mild symptoms.

Antibody levels in these people fell rapidly four months after infection and then slowly decreased for months afterward – results that are in line with other studies.

Some scientists have interpreted this drop as a sign of waning immunity, but it’s exactly what is expected, other experts said. If blood contained large amounts of antibodies to every pathogen the body had ever encountered, it would quickly turn into thick mud.

Updated

May 26, 2021, 11:32 a.m. ET

Instead, blood levels of antibodies drop sharply after an acute infection, while memory B cells in the bone marrow remain calm and ready to take action if necessary.

Dr. Ellebedy received bone marrow samples from 19 people approximately seven months after infection. Fifteen had detectable storage B cells but four did not, suggesting that some people may have very few cells or no cells at all.

“It tells me that even if you got infected, it doesn’t mean you have a super immune response,” said Dr. Ellebedy. The results confirm the idea that people who have recovered from Covid-19 should be vaccinated, he said.

Five of the participants in Dr. Ellebedy’s study donated bone marrow samples seven or eight months after the initial infection and again four months later. He and his colleagues found that the number of storage B cells remained stable over this time.

The results are especially noteworthy given that bone marrow samples are difficult to obtain, said Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the work.

A landmark 2007 study showed that antibodies can theoretically survive for decades, perhaps well beyond the average lifespan, suggesting the long-term existence of memory B cells. But the new study offered rare evidence of its existence, said Dr. Gommerman.

Dr. Nussenzweig studied how memory B cells mature over time. The researchers analyzed the blood of 63 people who had recovered from Covid-19 about a year earlier. The vast majority of participants had mild symptoms and 26 had also received at least one dose of the Moderna or Pfizer BioNTech vaccine.

So-called neutralizing antibodies, which were needed to prevent re-infection with the virus, remained unchanged between six and twelve months, while related but less important antibodies slowly disappeared, the team found.

As memory B cells evolved, the antibodies they produced developed the ability to neutralize an even wider group of variants. This continued maturation may be due to a small piece of the virus being bound by the immune system – for target practice, so to speak.

One year after infection, the neutralizing activity was lower in the non-vaccinated participants compared to all forms of the virus, with the greatest loss being recorded compared to the variant first identified in South Africa.

The vaccination significantly increased antibody levels and confirmed the results of other studies. The shots also increased the body’s ability to neutralize by 50 times.

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul said Sunday he would not receive a coronavirus vaccine because he was infected last March and was therefore immune.

However, there is no guarantee that such immunity will be strong enough to protect him for years, especially given the emergence of variants of the coronavirus that can partially bypass the body’s defenses.

The results of the study by Dr. Nussenzweig suggest that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and were later vaccinated will continue to have extremely high levels of protection against emerging variants, even without receiving a vaccine booster later.

“It looks exactly what we’d hope a good memory B-cell response would look like,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the new research.

All experts agreed that immunity in people who have never had Covid-19 is likely to vary widely. Fighting a live virus is different from responding to a single viral protein introduced by a vaccine. And in those who had Covid-19, the initial immune response had time to mature over six to 12 months before being challenged by the vaccine.

“These kinetics are different from someone who has been immunized and re-immunized three weeks later,” said Dr. Pepper. “That doesn’t mean they might not have that broad answer, but it could be very different.”

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Scientists Drove Mice to Bond by Zapping Their Brains With Mild

Scientists Drove Mice to Bond by Zapping Their Brains With Light

When research on so-called interbrain synchrony emerged in the 2000s, some scientists dismissed it as parapsychology, a trippy field of the 1960s and ’70s that claimed to find evidence of ghosts, the afterlife and other wonders of the paranormal.

In 1965, for example, two ophthalmologists published in the prestigious journal Science an absurd study of 15 pairs of identical twins. Each twin, with electrodes on their scalps, was placed in a separate room and asked to blink on command. In two of the pairs, the study reported, one twin showed distinctive patterns of brain activity while the sibling was blinking in the other room. The doctors called it “extrasensory induction.”

“The paper is hilarious,” said Guillaume Dumas, a social physiologist at the University of Montreal who has studied brain-to-brain synchrony for more than a decade. In that far-out era, he said, “there were many papers with methodologically questionable conclusions claiming to demonstrate interbrain synchronization with two people.”

Since then, however, many sound studies have found brain synchronies emerging during human interactions, starting with a paper in 2002 that described how to collect and merge data from two brain scanners simultaneously as two people played a competitive game. This enabled researchers to observe how both brains were activated in response to each other. In a Science paper in 2005, this “hyperscanning” technique showed correlations of activity in two people’s brains when they played a game based on trust.

In 2010, Dr. Dumas used scalp electrodes to find that when two people spontaneously imitated each other’s hand movements, their brains showed coupled wave patterns. Importantly, there was no external metronome — like music or a turn-taking game — that spurred the pairs to “tune in” to each other; it happened naturally in the course of their social interaction.

“There’s no telepathy or spooky thing at play,” Dr. Dumas said. Interacting with someone else is complicated, requiring an ongoing feedback loop of attention, prediction and reaction. It makes sense that the brain would have some way of mapping both sides of that interaction — your behaviors as well as the other person’s — simultaneously, although scientists still know very little about how that happens.