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by renewiltord 1743 days ago
Memory cells will produce the antibodies when they are necessary not continuously until the end of time. This paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.15.21262067v... just tested to see how many antibodies there are.

It's like saying "All people run out of edible food (antibodies) within hours of being hungry (exposure to distinct protein)". Well, yes, but we have the ingredients to make them in the fridge (memory cells). Just measuring the amount of cooked food (antibodies) will tell you how much I can eat right now, but I'm not going to starve (get sick) in the absence of the cooked food (antibodies) since I have the tools - raw food (memory cells) in case I get hungry (exposed again).

In the case of this study, they tell us we've run out of cooked food in 6 months. That doesn't tell us whether we'll starve, because we could have hella stores in the pantry and they specifically did not measure any of that.