... BUT HOW WILL THEY WORKOUT WHO NEEDS THE IMMUNITY BOOST?
THE prospect of being able to offer drugs to vulnerable patients that would prevent them from catching Covid is very attractive.
But how exactly doctors will decide who needs them is still not entirely clear. In America, they will be offered to high-risk groups, but this is a blunt method.
Some experts argue that measuring levels of antibodies in the blood – the immunesystem cells which are made by the body in response to an infection or the vaccine – could better predict who will fall seriously ill, despite being jabbed.
An Israeli study published at the end of July showed that fully vaccinated healthcare workers with low levels of Covid antibodies were more likely to be reinfected with the virus than those with higher levels.
Obviously, having antibodies is a good thing, but one person with a certain level might be immune, while another with the same level could become reinfected, for instance. And they are not the only immune system cells that provide a defence against Covid. T-cells are produced after infection or vaccination, but while antibodies may wane, T-cells stay in the body for longer, leading some scientists to argue they offer protection for years.
Having been double-jabbed, I was intrigued to find out what my antibody levels were. So last week, I visited private clinic London Medical Laboratory to undergo a blood test. I was positive for antibodies and given a specific score: 1,400.
Christina Owusu, The Mail on Sunday’s news desk manager, who earlier this year spent three weeks in intensive care with Covid-19, also took a test.
Christina had tested negative for Covid-19 antibodies when she left hospital, but now, having received both jabs, her score was 2,300.
Dr Quinton Fivelman, chief scientific officer for London Medical Laboratory, said: ‘An average score for someone who is double-vaccinated is somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000. But we’ve seen people get scores as high as 30,000.
‘If someone comes in and their score is in the hundreds, we recommend they see a doctor as it means they may not have had a response.’
Leading virus experts, however, argue that such antibody tests do not provide a definitive answer about protection.
Dr Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester, said: ‘There is no universally agreed standard of what counts as a good antibody response.’