Originally Posted by
Excargodog
I think the issue is between relatively short-lived (6-9 months) circulating neutralizing antibodies, which if high enough will decrease the likelihood of someone getting infected and activated T-cells which are longer lasting and will decrease the likelihood of you having serious consequences if they do get infected.
Yes. But in real-world application there's a balance/trade-off between antibody and memory cell titers. Observing the chemistry in the lab doesn't tell you how that will play out in the real world.
It's playing out as we speak, but I haven't seen anything indicating that vaccine efficacy against infection is waning due to dropping antibody levels. It most likely will eventually, but are we there yet? The large stage-3 trails from last year are still running, you'd think they'd be seeing something by now in those groups?
Jumping the gun on boosters will be very expensive (and profitable to the right people), and is not absolutely zero-risk. Although the risk from boosters is pretty low since the population by definition has already tolerated the vaccine in question once or twice.