A bunch of scientists seem to have their doubts. Most likely you'd need a booster eventually, but not necessarily annually.

Could be like pneumonia vaccine. Get it every 10 years. I am just speculating.

What are they basing that assumption on, it sounds like natural immunity, but natural cellular immunity is significantly more robust. I put an arrow on the epitope from the vaccine. They sound like a Fauci, "I only said you don't need masks because there was a shortage", type situation. Expect them to flip-flop when the time comes.
https://i.ibb.co/G3SbxvF/Covid-Tcell-epitopes.jpg

Natural immunity is typically not consistently more robust than vaccine-derived immunity. Natural immunity varies more widely between individuals due to differences in the course of the disease which triggered the immunity.

Natural immunity typically invokes the full spectrum of immune response (anti-bodies, various helper cells). Vaccine induced immunity may only trigger some of the full response, but that can be more than good enough. The covid vaccines (in the US) seem to be doing just fine.

That's not the case for Covid, like HIV it can block spike protein epitope expression along MHC I pathways. That's the problem with the variants. The Vaccine targets immature dedritic cells, these cells are one of the few in the body with MHC II pathways, to maximize production of neutralizing antibodies. Natural immunity targets, primarily, the N protein of the virus.

I'd have to go dig to even comment in detail on that, but what's the point? It works. Worst case, annual booster, maybe updated for variants (like the flu).

The cross reactivity of coronavirus antibodies can be very serious at low neutralizing levels, i.e. the other coronaviruses become a serious threat.

We saw somewhat similar data from Israel, this from LA County...

Out of the vaccinated population:

Breakthrough covid cases: 0.03%
Hospitalization: 0.002%
Fatality: 0.00036%



https://www.newsnationnow.com/health...officials-say/

Bahrain using pfizer as a booster to their original Sinopharm vaccine program, to counter a new wave of covid cases.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bahrain...=hp_listb_pos3

Novavax protein subunit vaccine may be available this summer. Late to the party, but it uses established technology and has easy logistics so might in the developing world. Also the more the merrier, in the event of more mutations since you never know which vaccines might work best for which strains until you try it.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...uld-debut-soon