Regeneron is a company, not a drug. They already have 6 drugs on the market. The drug President Trump got is one that is still in the clinical trials stage, and does not yet have a formal generic or brand name. It is known at this stage by an abbreviation for the company working on it and the disease it's for: REGN-COV2.
A vaccine or one's own natural immunity won't necessarily be lifelong. That varies a lot between different infectious diseases. You need a tetanus vaccination every 10 years. Nobody knows yet how long immunity lasts from active COVID-19 infection or how long it will last from any of the vaccines currently in development.
I'm using generalizations here. Many vaccines recommend boosters (some Hep series, etc.), obviously. But, theoretically, if a body is constantly exposed at a low level (or, of course, at a high concentration) to a pathogen, the body will keep building antibodies against it. The reasons for boosters, like the tetanus booster, is because (hopefully) we aren't constantly exposed to the tetanus pathogen.
Thanks for the name correction. I guess one good name for what Trump got is "REGENERON'S REGN-COV2 ANTIBODY COCKTAIL." (Work's been busy. I have vaguely followed this.) The point of what I said I hope was not lost, however. Merely to show the difference in how the treatments work in an ELI5 way.
I think the big question is how much the COVID virus mutates. It could turn out to be more like the flu, with a newly modified vaccine needed every year.
I don't think this was really developed in a lab. There's an awful lot of evidence that it originated in bats, and that the lab in Wuhan was working with it for that reason (i.e. because it had already been found in the wild, and there was concern that it could jump to humans). So it was multiplying in the lab, and maybe undergoing some different mutation patterns than it did in the wild, but I think the whole idea that it was deliberately developed in a lab to have the characteristics it displayed when it started spreading in the human population, is a half-cocked conspiracy theory.
Regeneron is a company, not a drug. They already have 6 drugs on the market. The drug President Trump got is one that is still in the clinical trials stage, and does not yet have a formal generic or brand name. It is known at this stage by an abbreviation for the company working on it and the disease it's for: REGN-COV2.
A vaccine or one's own natural immunity won't necessarily be lifelong. That varies a lot between different infectious diseases. You need a tetanus vaccination every 10 years. Nobody knows yet how long immunity lasts from active COVID-19 infection or how long it will last from any of the vaccines currently in development.
I'm using generalizations here. Many vaccines recommend boosters (some Hep series, etc.), obviously. But, theoretically, if a body is constantly exposed at a low level (or, of course, at a high concentration) to a pathogen, the body will keep building antibodies against it. The reasons for boosters, like the tetanus booster, is because (hopefully) we aren't constantly exposed to the tetanus pathogen.
Thanks for the name correction. I guess one good name for what Trump got is "REGENERON'S REGN-COV2 ANTIBODY COCKTAIL." (Work's been busy. I have vaguely followed this.) The point of what I said I hope was not lost, however. Merely to show the difference in how the treatments work in an ELI5 way.
I think the big question is how much the COVID virus mutates. It could turn out to be more like the flu, with a newly modified vaccine needed every year.
Yes, great point. Also, does a lab grown frankenstein virus mutate the same way a wildtype one would?
I don't think this was really developed in a lab. There's an awful lot of evidence that it originated in bats, and that the lab in Wuhan was working with it for that reason (i.e. because it had already been found in the wild, and there was concern that it could jump to humans). So it was multiplying in the lab, and maybe undergoing some different mutation patterns than it did in the wild, but I think the whole idea that it was deliberately developed in a lab to have the characteristics it displayed when it started spreading in the human population, is a half-cocked conspiracy theory.