Experts: Vaccine antibodies are better
Immune response far more robust compared to natural infection
People who get the COVID-19 vaccine are likely to be better protected from the novel coronavirus than those who survived an infection, health experts say.
“The immune response from being vaccinated is far more robust than the immune response from natural infection,” said Dr. Roberta Luskin-Hawk, chief executive of Providence St. Joseph Hospital and Redwood Memorial Hospital. “Your antibody levels are higher, looks like they last longer. For natural infection, I think we’re comfortable that for three months it looks pretty good, it could be longer.”
At a virtual community forum
on COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy Thursday night with Luskin-Hawk and Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, a CNN health analyst as well as president and chief clinical officer of Providence, the women explained even people who have already been infected should get the vaccine, though Compton-Phillips said they can rest easier as they wait for their turn.
“That’s because we believe that it does convey long-lasting immunity, at least for now,” ComptonPhillips said. ” … So three months after you’ve had the infection, then get the vaccine so … wait a little bit.”
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are both vaccines that use mRNA, or messenger RNA, molecules found in the body’s cells that are involved in producing proteins.
“It’s the instructions on how to make proteins,” Compton-Phillips said. “It’s the recipe and that recipe that gets into your cell turns your cell’s machinery on and your cell makes its own proteins.”
Those vaccines inject a tiny amount of mRNA into a person and let the cells do the work to produce all the proteins that will eventually result in antibodies that protect against a COVID-19 infection, she said.
More research is being done on the vaccines, such as how safe it is for pregnant women, they said, and more vaccines are on their way, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that only requires one dose.
That vaccine isn’t novel like the mRNA vaccines,
Compton-Phillips said; The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is an adenovirus vaccine that uses a weakened monkey pox virus that doesn’t normally infect humans as a shell to carry a spike protein that will create an immune response.
That vaccine can be stored at refrigerator temperatures, making it logistically simpler to distribute, Compton-Phillips said.
The mRNA vaccines are 90 to 95% effective, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is “somewhere in the mid-70%” range in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, Compton-Phillips said.
“In those very few people who still get the disease, they get it much less severely,” Compton-Phillips said. “And, in fact, there were zero deaths in the trials of people who’d gotten the vaccine and nobody with severe disease,” including the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
It’s important for everyone, including low-risk populations, to be vaccinated because even an asymptomatic COVID-19 infection can have long-term consequences, such as headaches and fatigue, that health officials are calling long-haul syndrome, Compton-Phillips said.
“There is not great correlation between having a severe infection or even having a symptomatic infection and getting these post-symptomatic types of symptoms,” Compton-Phillips said. “And so it is one of the big reasons we want to promote vaccination in everybody, not only to avoid passing it onto others but so that you don’t have your life impacted.”