RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Researchers from Sheba Medical Center in Israel on Wednesday, January 20th, presented the results of a study with 102 subjects administered the two doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 with a hitherto unprecedented perspective.
According to the group of scientists, the vaccine can produce such a strong immune response that it can prevent the transmission of the coronavirus between individuals.
The study has not yet been published and there is no further evidence regarding the vaccine’s capacity to reduce transmissibility. For this reason, physical distancing measures and mask wearing are still required.
However, professor Gili Regev-Yochay, who conducted the research, stressed that the findings were “encouraging and reasonable enough to presume that these people will not be carriers [of the coronavirus] or contagious, although this is not yet a direct conclusion,” according to the International Business Times website.
She argued that, based on the levels of antibodies detected in the immunized subjects, they would be sufficient to prevent the coronavirus from replicating in the body of people exposed to it.
The patients developed 20 times more antibodies against the coronavirus after the second dose of the vaccine. But two of them did not produce any defense – one immunocompromised patient and another who is being studied.
The vaccines against covid-19 were developed with the initial purpose of reducing as many severe cases of Covid-19 as possible and, consequently, deaths.
Thus, scientists and laboratories say that it is possible that vaccinated individuals contract the coronavirus and keep it in the body for some time, thus being able to transmit it.
The vaccine’s ability to break the SARS-CoV-2 transmission chains will only be observed once there is a large number of vaccinated people.
Experts estimate that Israel is the first country where this should be perceived, as almost 30% of its nine million inhabitants have already been vaccinated, the highest percentage of immunized people in the world.