The studies, from Israel and from Qatar and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, support arguments that even fully vaccinated people need to maintain precautions against infection.
“We conducted this prospective longitudinal cohort study involving health care workers at Sheba Medical Center, a large tertiary medical center in Israel,” Sheba’s Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay and colleagues wrote.
The researchers noted that levels of so-called neutralizing antibodies — the immune system’s first line of defense against infection — correlate with protection against infection, but for this study they studied only antibody levels.
“Published work about many vaccines, such as those against measles, mumps, and rubella, has shown a small decrease each year of 5 to 10% in the neutralizing antibody levels,” they wrote. “We found that a significant and rapid decrease in humoral response to the BNT162b2 vaccine was observed within months after vaccination.”
The study also indicated that immunity for people who get vaccinated after natural Covid-19 infection lasts longer. It’s especially strong for people who recovered from infection and then got vaccinated, also. “Overall, the accumulating evidence from our study and others shows that long-term humoral response and vaccine effectiveness in previously infected persons were superior to that in recipients of two doses of vaccine,” they wrote.
“BNT162b2-induced protection against infection builds rapidly after the first dose, peaks in the first month after the second dose, and then gradually wanes in subsequent months,” Laith Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and colleagues wrote. “The waning appears to accelerate after the fourth month, to reach a low level of approximately 20% in subsequent months,” they added.
Nonetheless, protection against hospitalization and death stayed at above 90%, they said.
The waning protection may involve behavior, they noted. “Vaccinated persons presumably have a higher rate of social contact than unvaccinated persons and may also have lower adherence to safety measures,” they wrote. “This behavior could reduce real-world effectiveness of the vaccine as compared with its biologic effectiveness, possibly explaining the waning of protection.”
But it’s a signal that countries should prepare for fresh surges of Covid-19. “These findings suggest that a large proportion of the vaccinated population could lose its protection against infection in the coming months,…
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