But there’s another piece of the immunity puzzle that scientists are urgently trying to solve, and that is whether some of this drop off in our protection may be a result of the mRNA technology used to build some Covid-19 vaccines, such as those developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, which were the first in the world to use this platform.

“Some vaccine platforms give a very high degree of protection but the durability isn’t very long,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in an interview with CNN.

Fauci said that the mRNA platform may be one of those…

What we can tell after more than a year of experience with the mRNA vaccines is that their protection starts high but seems to fade more quickly than the immunity that remains after a Covid-19 infection, according to Bhattacharya.

“There have been a few side-by-side studies that have compared the mRNA vaccines to infection-induced immunity, and it seems like it slips a little bit faster than that,” Bhattacharya said.