Dr Anne Moore (above), UCC School of Pharmacy

Earlier.

Dr Anne Moore, senior lecturer in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at University College Cork (UCC), spoke with Bryan Dobson on RTE Radio One’s News at One about covid vaccine efficacy or lack thereof.

Dr Moore said:

“As time goes by…straight after immunisation, you’ve a very, very strong immune response that, over time, will just, naturally, most vaccines will do this, all vaccines do this, whereby the immune response will just settle down to kind of a threshold level. So at the very start, just after vaccination, you’re very highly protected, you’ve a very strong response at even getting infected.

“But these vaccines aren’t made or designed to prevent transmission. So over time, that ability that they have at a community level, to decrease the amount of community transmission, is decreasing so it’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing more transmission in the community. Because vaccines, they’re not designed to do that.

“They did have that effect, and they do very early after vaccination. But as a population, as more of us go further in time from our last vaccination, those vaccines, we have less of that ability to prevent transmission and virus loads in our naval cavities are going up slightly and we’re passing it on more.”

Later

“Ultimately what we need is a vaccine that prevents transmission, similar to what we saw, you know, with Polio vaccines. The oral Polio vaccine, you know, was so much better at preventing transmission, compared to an injected one. So there’s still a lot of work to be done in making the perfect vaccine. The ones we have are great, they’ve fantastic ability to keep people out of hospital; but they’re not going to prevent transmission in the community and we need to be aware of that.”

Anyone?

Earlier: Sick leave

Pic: Tomas Tyner/UCC