[mullingitover]

> Another is that the vaccination gives the immune system a firm kick up its B-cells, activating it against other bugs that might contribute to dementia.

It's weird that they kinda gloss over the very real and open questions here, because the idea that the AS01 adjuvant is involved in the dementia protection is very much alive and an ongoing topic. A paper from last year[1] looked into it and found that the Shingrix shingles vaccine and the RSV vaccine are about the same in their risk reduction for dementia (with a bunch of caveats).

I believe the current evidence point to the shingles vaccine helping, but also a protective effect happening from the AS01 adjuvant on its own.

I'm not a researcher but my layman's take is that the Economist whiffed it here, and there's a more interesting and complicated story to be told beyond this clickbait-adjacent science journalism.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12198376/