Credit photo Nick Zonna
For most people, after a year and a half of a pandemic, the vaccine appointment is the time to breathe a sigh of relief while waiting for the moment of total release of fear when the second vaccination is also done.
This is for almost everyone, apart from those few irresponsible ones, mostly no vax and in the remaining part among the devourers of fake news. The only ones to understand among vaccine critics are those who have particular allergies and must be followed closely by their doctor.
But with the vaccine, and satisfaction set aside, many are wondering “But is he really defending me from the disease?”.
This legitimate question has been answered by many experts, among them too Maria Montoya, number one in the viral immunology group at the Margarita Salas Biological Research Center (CSIC) and member of the board of the Spanish Society of Immunology investigating SARS-CoV-2.
The scientist confirmed that there is no reason to think that a vaccine does not generate antibodies. The countless scientific evidence says that all vaccinated people are protected.
What is known is that Covid vaccines are not 100% efficient because their coverage capacity is around 95-97%, but this does not mean that in rare cases the vaccine does not work as it should.
This failure in medicine does not mean that the vaccine has done wrong, but that it does not develop antibodies in an organism that it is supposed to stimulate.
At the moment in the new Coronavirus vaccines this has never happened.
But what do you rely on to know if a freshly inoculated vaccine is doing its job?
To know if a vaccine has worked as it should, it is necessary examine the immune response. This response can be antibody or cellular.
The cellular response is certainly more complex to observe, but there are currently many types of tests to find out if you have antibodies against protein S, which is the one used by the vaccines that are given to us now.
Therefore, to know if the vaccine administered has generated antibodies, it is only necessary to do a rapid test for antibodies against the S protein.
But even if the test said that the antibody level is low, nothing would happen because the vaccine probably also worked in the direction of a cellular response.
Controlling the cellular response is a much more complex process that requires a specialized laboratory.
The best answer to the question “but my vaccine is working well” is found in the hundreds of clinical trials already carried out with hundreds of thousands of people and whose results guarantee the value of vaccines with very high efficacy and an equally strong capacity to generate antibodies.
Current data from countries where vaccination is advancing rapidly such as Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom and also Italy and Spain, there has been a collapse in infections and above all in mortality.
The vaccine does not protect against infection, but it prevents disease.
The fact that its effectiveness is between 95% and 97% means that out of a hundred vaccinated people who are infected, 95/97 pass the disease asymptomatically, do not discover it, and only three develop it but not in in such a way as to bring them to the hospital or to death.
The most important aspect to remember and emphasize several times when wondering if vaccines are effective are the data of millions of vaccinated people.
A perfect case is that of Israel where there was a very fast immunization. What we have seen is that in addition to the millions of vaccinated people immunized, even members of the Orthodox communities who have not been vaccinated have had far fewer cases of Covid-19.
In conclusion, there are three certainties about vaccines supported by millions of data: more vaccinated, fewer diseases and less mortality.