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Research conducted in Southern California has confirmed the dramatic erosion of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine’s protection against “breakthrough” coronavirus infections. The new study, one of the largest and longest to track the effectiveness of a vaccine in Americans, found that the vaccine’s ability to protect against infection stood at 88% in its first month, then fell to 47% after just five months. (Healy, 10/4)

The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine continues to be 90 percent effective in protecting against hospitalization and death from covid-19 up to six months after the second dose, even in the face of the widespread delta variant, a major study has found. The study was based on research from Pfizer and the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health system, and analyzed more than 3.4 million people who were members between December 2020 and August 2021. The findings were published in the Lancet medical journal on Monday and had been released in August but were not peer-reviewed until this week. (Pietsch and Suliman, 10/5)

Reinfection from SARS-CoV-2 under endemic conditions will most likely occur at a median of 16 months, according to a modeling study published late last week in The Lancet Microbe. The researchers looked at the human-infecting coronaviruses SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, and HCoV-NL63 from Feb 12 to Jun 15, 2020, analyzing about 58 alphacoronavirus, 105 betacoronavirus, 11 deltacoronavirus, and 3 gammacoronavirus genome sequences. They compared peak-infection and reinfection data in endemic scenarios. The method also used antibody optical density data spanning 128 days to 28 years post-infection from 1984 to 2020. (10/4)

In the past few weeks, anti-vaxxers have rallied behind a nonpeer-reviewed study by a group of Canadian researchers as evidence against COVID-19 vaccines. Turns out, the paper made a fatal mistake in reaching its conclusion. Scientists at The University of Ottawa Heart Institute have retracted the preprint study, which falsely calculated a 1 in 1,000 risk of heart inflammation for Moderna's and Pfizer-BioNTech's mRNA COVID vaccines. The study authors have withdrawn the manuscript “because of a major error pertaining to the quoted incidence data,” the team said in a retraction statement on Sept. 24. (Liu, 10/4)

Kayvon Modjarrad is out to win the war against this pandemic—and the next one. An emerging-infectious-diseases researcher with the U.S. Army, Dr. Modjarrad is pursuing a vaccine to protect against a range of coronaviruses that cause disease in humans—including Covid-19 variants that might elude today’s vaccines. The goal is to prevent the next new one from spreading around the globe. Such a shot might even stop coronaviruses that cause some common colds. (McKay, 10/4)

Two scientists whose research contributed to the development of COVID-19 vaccines missed out on the latest Nobel Prize in medicine, which on Monday was given to two U.S.-based professors for their work on heat and touch. American Drew Weissman and Hungarian-born Katalin Kariko — who worked closely together to understand the benefits of messenger RNA, or mRNA — were among the front-runners for the prestigious award as many admirers saw them as the heroes behind two of the world’s most successful coronavirus vaccines. (Oliveira, 10/4)