Coronavirus vaccines may not work in some people due to underlying conditions. Immunocompromised.
Last edited Tue May 18, 2021, 09:23 PM - Edit history (1)
- Washington Post, May 18, 2021. - Excerpts, Edited. Early research shows that 15- 80% of people with certain medical conditions, such as specific blood cancers or organ transplants, are generating few antibodies after receiving Covid vaccines.
- “Risk is very different for people in my situation,” said Maria Hoffman, a kidney transplant patient who works for the Medical University of South Carolina.
Maria Hoffman feels as though she has been left behind. Her adopted hometown of Charleston, S.C., is hopping- restaurants and bars fully open, park concerts in swing and maskless friends reuniting with hugs on streets. Hoffman, 39, is fully vaccinated and eager to rejoin the world. But as a kidney transplant patient, she is hesitant to participate for fear of becoming infected. “Risk is very different for people in my situation,” “I am 100% acting like I am not immunized.” The state worker is among millions of immunocompromised Americans, about 3- 4% of the U.S. population, for whom the shots may not work fully, or at all, and who are unsure of their place in a country that is increasingly opening up.
Emerging research shows that 15- 80% of those with certain conditions, such as specific blood cancers or who have had organ transplants, are generating few antibodies. Federal health officials’ decision last week to rescind almost all masking and distancing recommendations for those who are fully vaccinated only added to the sense of fear, isolation and confusion for those with immune issues. On social media, many such patients expressed frustration that the change might leave them with less- not more- freedom as their risk of infection grows as more of their neighbors and co-workers ditch their masks.
Hoffman, who has been advised by her doctors to act as though she never got the shots, recounted how she visited a grocery store but became anxious and left after a maskless man struck up a conversation. “I wear my mask out of respect for others, and for those who are sick,” she said. “If you aren’t wearing a mask, we can’t make you now.” Vaccine makers excluded immunocompromised people from clinical trials in an understandable rush to develop a way to protect as many people as quickly as possible. As a result, there’s limited information about how this group is reacting to the shots, as well as to the loosening of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restrictions. The ability of such patients to fend off the novel coronavirus is not just a footnote in the pandemic involving one unlucky group- but potentially a critical part of the narrative about how new, more contagious variants are continuing to emerge worldwide.
The interaction between immunocompromised people and the virus is perhaps one of the pandemic’s most fraught questions. Case studies have detailed how some patients can have active infections for many months- resulting in questions about whether they can act as incubators for mutations that lead to new variants and underscoring the need for an effective vaccine strategy not just for their sake, but for the greater good... The good news, he [Dorry Segev, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine] and other researchers say, is that scientists are prepared with some potential solutions, such as boosters or high-dose shots. They just need to scramble to study them so they can offer them as soon as possible...
Read More, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/05/18/immunocompromised-coronavirus-vaccines-response/