Scientists unlock clues to determining how safe vaccinated people are from Covid-19

Imagine peering into people’s blood and being able to pick up a simple marker of exactly how well protected they are from Covid-19. It’s a pressing goal for scientists who are still trying to understand what immunity to the coronavirus looks like, how robustly vaccines protect us over time, and how protected people are who’ve had and recovered from Covid-19. Now, a year and a half into the pandemic, researchers are starting to flesh out exactly what these “correlates of protection” look like, a step that could help track the durability of immunity and speed the development of additional vaccines. In a preprint paper last week, a group of researchers from both academia and U.S. health agencies reported their findings of the immune correlates for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.