06/18/2021

The Challenge of COVID-19 Vaccines for the Immunosuppressed

Recent studies find many people who get the shot don’t make many antibodies

In the United States, COVID vaccination has been framed as a binary: People either seek out the inoculation, or they distrust the formula—or the politics that produced it—and reject the shot. People who accept the vaccine get to return to normal life. For the people who don't, "Your health is in your hands," as Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tweeted in May.

But that binary never accounted for the many people who wanted the shot but couldn't obtain it: because vaccine campaigns didn't come to their neighborhoods, or lack of sick leave wouldn't let them risk side effects, or they didn't meet eligibility criteria in the early days when supply was limited. Now it's becoming clear that this binary also excludes another enormous group: People who received the shot but were not protected by it, because their immune systems didn't manufacture an adequate defense.

Millions of Americans are immunosuppressed or immune-compromised. That is, they take drugs to make sure that a transplanted organ is not rejected or to tamp down the overactive immunity that produces rheumatoid arthritis and lupus; or, alternatively, they have illnesses that undermine their ability to defend against pathogens. A handful of research papers published over the past few months all find the same result: When these patients receive COVID vaccines, their bodies don't create as many defensive antibodies as those of healthy people. Some have contracted the disease despite being fully vaccinated—meaning that, to protect themselves, they must continue to behave as though their vaccinations never occurred.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.