I was much too young to understand Jonas Salk’s brilliance when Mom brought me to Dr. Peluso in October 1955 in my first polio vaccination, but I suspect she and pa breathed a sigh of relief. Like the majority of folks, they had watched cases rise dramatically after The second world war, reaching a peak of 52,000 in 1952, and that i can imagine them waiting anxiously for that arrival of a vaccine that would protect me and my two older brothers.
Now, nearly 65 years later, an even deadlier pandemic has again raised expectations the most vulnerable among us might someday be delivered from harm by a miracle serum. I’m not holding my breath. And, to be completely honest, I’m unsure I’d roll up my sleeve.
Any geezer who’s suffered via a nasty case of influenza despite choosing the seasonal vaccine will tell you that it’s a crapshoot. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. I ignore all of the dire warnings every fall and also have always managed to keep the bug away. Maybe my immune system fends them back each year courtesy of my slapdash exercise program, a mostly healthy diet, lots of sleep, and a stress-fighting meditation practice. Or possibly it’s just dumb luck.
As Jonathan Wosen notes within the Washington Post, the 2021–2021 flu shot effectively prevented the virus in about three of five children, but only one of four people over 50. That’s aided by the fact that scientists can only guess at the particular strain that’s mobilizing to fight us each year, but it’s mostly concerning the inefficiency of the aging defense mechanisms.
And any coronavirus vaccine will probably perform similarly, University of Pennsylvania immunologist Michael Cancro, PhD, tells Wosen. “I doubt it will be worse; I don’t think it will be better.”
Young bodies respond to an effective vaccine by alerting an army of B cells that seek out invading pathogens and mark them for destruction by T cells. By the time we join the Medicare set, however, those B cells have forfeit some of their tactical precision. The antibodies they produce become less fine-tuned, allowing some infected cells to escape detection. We’ve also been losing T cells since our 20s, when the body stopped producing new ones, so even when our B cells could locate every offending pathogenic cell, we wouldn’t be able to marshal the artillery needed to eradicate them.
This also explains why folks my age are often laid low by viruses we come across for the first time. We do harbor so-called memory cells that spring into action when a familiar pathogen (in my case, measles, mumps, and chickenpox, which I contracted as a child) enters the body, but they’re less functional as we age — and less effective against the rapidly mutating strains of the virus we encounter every flu season.
“We still don’t exactly understand why the heck that is,” says Cancro, “but it’s a well known fact.”
Amid all this uncertainty, Cancro points to several hopeful signs. Researchers have, in fact, been able to improve the efficacy from the flu vaccine in the elderly by developing a higher-dose version that boosts antibody and T-cell response. And they’ve upgraded the shingles vaccine in recent years by strengthening T-cell memory. It’s now about 90 % effective against the virus among people over 70.
“We’re seeing more imagination in the way we formulate vaccines,” Cancro explains, “either in terms of mimicking what a pathogen appears like or providing molecules that drive immune cells.”
I suspect researchers will require all the creativity they can muster to wrestle the novel coronavirus into submission. And, if that virus behaves anything like the seasonal flu bug, the battle will rage for generations to come. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to keep my distance from people, don my mask at the appropriate interval, and hope for the best. That doesn’t mean I won’t be rooting for the next Jonas Salk; an effective vaccine could save countless lives. But I may need some convincing before I accept the notion that it could save mine.
