Jerusalem, Jan 20: A study from Israel indicates that people who received the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine develop an immune response significantly stronger than COVID-19 survivors.
These researchers think this sort of immunity might completely prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission, although more data is needed to prove that’s the case.
Researchers from the Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Aviv studied the immune response in 102 hospital staff members who received both Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine shots. They found that 100 people developed up to 20 times more antibodies within a week of the second dose than COVID-19 survivors who went through severe COVID-19 cases. Of the two people who did not develop antibodies, one is a person who is immunocompromised.
It’s unclear why the second person did not get antibodies, and the hospital is investigating the matter.
The higher the number of antibodies, the harder it would be for the virus to infect cells and replicate enough for vaccinated people to become infected. That’s the theory so far, and this is just an initial study.
“People who have received both doses of the vaccine have levels of antibodies ranging from six to 59. These are high values, and it’s encouraging and reasonable to assume that these people will not be carriers or contagious, although that is still not a direct conclusion,” Professor Gili Regev-Yochay said in a media briefing.
“The results of the survey are in line with Pfizer’s experiment and even better than expected,” she added. “I expect that the survey results of the other employees participating will be similar. There is certainly reason for optimism.”
