Another interesting article:
Dr James claimed that ‘the science is not strong enough’ and that he didn’t need a vaccine because he had antibodies, showing he had acquired some ‘natural’ immunity through infection.
Meanwhile, the unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic used a similar argument to get into Australia — claiming an exemption on the grounds that he had Covid in December and would, therefore, be protected by his antibodies.
The trouble with this argument is that, firstly, the unvaccinated and unboosted make up the majority of those in intensive care. And secondly, just because you have antibodies against a previous strain of Covid, that does not mean you are protected against catching, or spreading it to more vulnerable people such as patients with cancer or pregnant women.
A study published in December, by researchers from Imperial College London, concluded that the protection against Omicron, if you have had a prior Covid infection ‘may be as low as 19 per cent’. A course of vaccines — the double dose plus the booster — on the other hand, offers something like 75 per cent protection.
Why the difference? It appears that our immune systems are very good at learning from experience. The more often your immune system is challenged by a virus (or a vaccine, which is mimicking that virus), the better it gets at defending itself against it.
The first time your immune system encounters a virus it isn’t quite sure how to react and it takes time to start building an effective response. While that is happening, the virus is busy replicating, spreading and doing damage.
If you’re lucky, your immune system will spring into action and you will recover after a trivial illness. If you are unlucky, you end up in hospital, perhaps in intensive care. The idea of a vaccine is that your immune system gets the nudge to start working long before you are exposed to the real thing.
The reason for a second, and even third jab, is this amplifies and refines your immune response to protect you, and others, in the future.
Multiple exposures seems to be particularly effective at educating your T-cells, immune cells responsible for seeking out and killing dangerous viruses, and which are vital for conferring long-term immunity. T-cells also seem to be much better than antibodies at detecting and destroying new variants of Covid.
And this matters because one of the main reasons for getting vaccinated, as far as I’m concerned, is that by doing so you’re protecting others — particularly the vulnerable who cannot have a jab.
We know that people who are vaccinated carry a lower load of virus, and clear it faster from their bodies, so there is a much lower chance they will pass it on. Vaccines, of course, can have side-effects and are not 100 per cent effective. One of the criticisms of Covid vaccines is that, despite being triple jabbed, you can still get infected and become ill.
This is true, though you’re far less likely to get seriously ill than if you were completely unprotected. And there is the consolation that you may now have ‘super immunity’. In a study by the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research in Boston in the U.S., researchers tested the blood of people who’d caught Covid after being double vaccinated.
*They now had a 30-fold increase in levels of antibodies and a four-fold increase in levels of T-cells, compared with patients who had been vaccinated and who had not got Covid; which bodes well for future encounters with the virus.*emphasised text
