Virologist from Novosibirsk shared his experience in counting BAU units
The government of the Rostov region intends to study the practice of issuing QR codes to residents with high antibodies to coronavirus, regardless of whether they were “officially” sick or not. We will remind that earlier the governor of another region, Chuvashia, announced plans to implement such a system in the republic, which could start operating in November. Sergei NETESOV, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Biotechnology, Microbiology and Virology at Novosibirsk State University, told us about his attitude to the introduction of such codes.
The issue of issuing QR codes to those who are not vaccinated, but who have had an unofficial illness, and therefore have antibodies to the S-protein of the coronavirus, was raised on Friday not only by the governor of Chuvashia, Oleg Nikolaev, and picked up in the Rostov region. With the initiative to equalize the rights of all citizens with antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, Sergei Leonov, the Deputy Chairman of the Duma Committee on Health Protection, turned to the Minister of Health of Russia Mikhail Murashko.
The fact that the initiative is good is not rejected, among other things, by the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
The first and most important question here is, what should be the level of antibodies in a person so that he can receive the coveted QR code, which gives the right not to be vaccinated against coronavirus for 6 months?
As the head of the Chuvash Ministry of Digital Arts Kristina Mainina explained earlier, the “base level” of antibodies sufficient to obtain a QR code can be based on the approaches voiced by the Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko, who stated that “the presence of 300 units of antibodies according to European standards provides protection against disease, the presence of 500 antibodies is a guaranteed protection. “
The fact that 300 BAUs (International Universal Units – Binding Antibody Units, in which WHO recommends counting the number of antibodies to the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the coronavirus S-protein) are sufficient to protect a person from the delta strain of coronavirus was said earlier and creator of the Sputnik-V vaccine, academician Alexander Gintsburg.
According to Sergei Netesov, several independent studies should still be carried out on this matter. In particular, he referred to other BAU values given in one of the publications of researchers from the Toulouse Institute of Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases and the University Hospital of Toulouse in the Journal of Infection
– According to this article, – says Netesov, – people with BAU up to a thousand units can still become infected, and some of them are sick with the delta variant. More precisely, there is evidence that only a titer of 2000 BAU and more reliably protects against the delta strain. Of course, all these estimates are preliminary. But science is such a system of knowledge in which everything is tested. It is possible that in the group with which Gunzburg conducted the study, there were lower doses of infection with the delta variant.
Professor Netesov cited his personal experience as an example of counting antibodies to coronavirus:
– At the end of last year, I got sick with coronavirus quite easily. After 9, 5 months after that, I checked the level of antibodies, which was 32 on the BAU scale, and decided that it was time to revaccinate. A month after booster vaccination, my BAU level increased to 3800. This is a very good level of protection, sufficient to protect against the delta strain of coronavirus, which allows me to feel calm for six months. But I still wear a mask in public places, because I am 68 years old, and the risks of a serious illness, of course, are greater than those of young people.
REFERENCE “MK”
Association of BAU with the level of immunity, which was established by scientists in Toulouse
– A BAU / ml level above 140 with a probability of more than 95% protects against serious illness in case of infection with the original (“Wuhan”) variant of the coronavirus
– BAU / ml level from 140 to 1700 with a probability of more than 89% protects against any disease in case of infection with the original (“Wuhan”) variant of coronavirus
– A BAU / ml level above 2200 is likely to protect against delta disease.
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