Fight against virus is far from finished

Wait, a booster? The chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, says those who have received the company’s two-shot coronavirus vaccine are “likely” to need “a third dose, somewhere between six and 12 months and then from there, there will be an annual revaccination,” depending on the science.

This should not be a cause for dismay. Rather, it is a window into the future — the battle against the coronavirus will go on for years and will require agility and different behavior.

Getting that first shot has been hard, but the vaccination campaign has on balance been an extraordinary accomplishment, with two highly effective messenger RNA vaccines developed, manufactured and administered in record time.

The vaccines train the body’s immune system to be ready to attack the virus. How long that immunity will last is not yet known, but a booster is a good backup should it wane. Even more significantly, a booster might be tweaked to improve efficacy against the evolving variants.

The coronavirus is somewhere between measles, which the immune system can recognize over decades, and influenza, which requires a new shot every year — and it is probably closer to influenza in that sense. Hopefully, the manufacturers will be ready with tens of millions of booster doses, while at the same time managing to produce enough for the rest of the world to be immunized.

But Bourla’s announcement underscores that the course of the pandemic is still uncertain. It will not just stop one day. The coronavirus will demand that our lifestyles adapt. People will have to continue to wear masks in closed, tight public settings. More work must be done to engineer better ventilation. Political leaders must accept the need to ramp up public health surveillance against viral threats, an area where the United States remains woefully unprepared.

Another worthy goal is to make viral testing as simple as taking a temperature, so people can test themselves or get tested before doing things such as going to concerts or getting on planes. Such tests could serve the same function as metal detectors do in stadiums and airports. Vaccine passports of some kind may become popular as proof that you are safe to be around others.

We need some humility, too. If not enough people are vaccinated, if vulnerable people congregate and transmit, if they ignore restrictions and mitigation measures, then the pandemic will rage on. Today, 49.1% of the population of the United States age 18 and over has received at least one vaccine dose — leaving about half the population still vulnerable. And daily new infections are exceeding 70,000, with some states seeing a surge even as vaccines roll out.

At the current torrid pace of vaccination, the United States should reach the 70% threshold for herd immunity before long, but the very concept of herd immunity is fragile and elusive, and the barrier could be eroded by variants that are more contagious and lethal. No miracle will stop the pandemic, only a well-grounded realism and tools that work, including masks, vaccines — and boosters.