JCVI expert warns booster vaccines will wear off

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If you have had either both Pfizer or Moderna jabs and have had COVID-19 before, you could be in luck. Researchers are calling this “superhuman immunity” or “hybrid immunity”. It is when patients’ immune systems produce a large number of antibodies that can respond to different Covid variants. This has been the case in a number of recent studies.

There was one study where a patient with “hybrid immunity” showed the ability to respond to the current variants, like Delta, which has put pressure on the NHS.

Experts believe it will also work against variants that don’t even exist yet.

These patients are being studied by scientists to help them get a better understanding of how to build up immunity to coronavirus as well as immunity against other viruses.

So far, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have proven to be be highly effective in protecting against the virus.

Only 10,500 people who have two doses of vaccines have been hospitalised in the US with 2,000 deaths.

Vaccines function by providing your immune system with a genetic code from the virus, mRNA, which allows the immune system to recognize the virus and therefore helps to build up immunity through antibodies.

But people who have had Covid recently also have a lot of antibodies and also have a high level of immunity to the COVID-19, as their immune systems recognise and remember how to fend off the virus.

That is why, with the combination of both having had the virus and having had both doses of the vaccine, it may result in this “superhuman” immunity.

Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist at Rockefeller University, said: “Those people have amazing responses to the vaccine.

“’I think they are in the best position to fight the virus.

“The antibodies in these people’s blood can even neutralize SARS-CoV-1, the first coronavirus, which emerged 20 years ago. That virus is very, very different from SARS-CoV-2.”

In natural immunity that results from having had the virus, the immune system builds up different mechanisms to defend your body against future infection

This B cells and T cells, which remember the virus and can stimulate antibody production in the event of another infection.

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Studies have shown that natural immunity will normally last for seven to eight months

After about a year, you may become more vulnerable to different variants as the immune system’s memory decreases.

But if someone with natural immunity also gets double vaccinated, then the vaccines will boost their immune system’s memory, and the defence mechanisms which were in place will remain.

Rockerfella University’s study looked at 15 patients who were previously infected with coronavirus and were and later fully vaccinated.

They tested them against six Covid variants and all ‘hybrid immunity patients’ were able to fend them off with antibodies.

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