NEW ORLEANS — A couple months before the pandemic started, Joseph Ford started experiencing a rash of pinpoint polka dots around his lips, ankles, and lower legs. They were itchy, inflamed, painful, and, for him, the first signs of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “Petechiae,” he explained. Just as he was starting to deal with that, Covid-19 changed the world.

“Go home and stay there,” Ford, a 77-year-old retired librarian in Tumwater, Wash., recalled a physician telling him as Covid hollowed out society. “You won’t survive a Covid infection.”

That advice has largely remained unchanged over the last two years for the millions who, like Ford, are immunocompromised and haven’t produced adequate — or any — antibodies from the Covid-19 vaccines. But researchers at the University Hospital Tübingen are designing a vaccine to elicit a deeper T cell response than the currently approved vaccines by targeting several key points on viral proteins — epitopes — that are good at stirring up immune T cells.

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