From The Medical Republic, 21 March 2022:
There was a time before covid, which seems a distant memory now, when the concepts of “immune” and “immunised” seemed relatively straightforward to anyone outside the field of immunology.
Either by virtue of childhood infection or vaccination, a person believed that they were now protected from further assault by that particular pathogen. Even the Oxford dictionary defines “immune” as “resistant to a particular infection”.
Along comes SARS-CoV-2 and a global pandemic that has ripped the scales from our eyes and thrust us, whether we like it or not, into the highly complex world of antibodies, antigens, immunoglobulins, B cells and T cells. It has also revealed just how naïve our expectation of immunity was.
The arrival of covid vaccines raised hopes that this would spell the end of the pandemic and bury this pesky virus. But then came the first breakthrough infections, then variants, then third doses, then Omicron. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 