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Join EFIS for a scientific symposium dedicated to exploring - from an immunological standpoint - the unresolved issues and misconceptions of COVID-19 vaccination five years after the WHO declaration of the pandemic. Participation will be limited to 80 in-person attendees, but the event will be live-streamed and made available for subsequent viewing. 

Register here. 

Download the preliminary program here, and the symposium poster for institutional display purposes here.

In a nutshell...
In Europe, the success of vaccination campaigns had moved infectious diseases out of public awareness, before SARS-CoV-2 reminded us the harsh way, 5 years ago. Immunology, the science of how we protect our self and react to infectious pathogens, had just reached a new level of understanding of immunity, characterizing immune cells individually in blood and in the tissues, on a molecular level. Now immunological paradigms faced the real world test of the pandemic. In this retrospective, we will discuss how the virus infects, tries to suppress our immune reaction, reactivates other viruses, and even may generate autoimmunity, how the immune system protects from infection and from severe disease, why antibodies have at least two equal binding sites for their antigen, how our immune system adapts to variants of the virus by affinity maturation, but also is imprinted for original versions, why the elderly were the most vulnerable, and how efficient vaccines were, also on a clinical scale. An exiting journey across old and new immunological landscapes.