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News

09 Aug 2021

Setting it Straight: Vaccination, risk/benefit, herd immunity and passive immunity

Before taking the discussion of possible drug and antibody treatments (#66, #67, #68) further, I’ll step back to summarise where we are with protective immunity. Through this series we’ve looked at the antibody, or immunoglobulin (Ig), response (#18, #19, #20, #21) that, whether induced by vaccination (#43, #44, #45) or infection (#11, #19, #46) is our major protection against catching COVID-19 for a first (vaccines), or second (#23, #24, #25) time. As we’ve seen with the global rollout of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, even outstanding products like the AstraZeneca adenovirus-vectored and Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccines may not protect against some virus replication in the upper respiratory tract (URT). And, while people who’ve had two vaccine shots are about 90% less likely to develop severe disease that requires hospitalisation (#49) they can still transmit the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, though likely at a lower level.