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Does person need to take a Covid vaccine if already has antibodies?
If person already has antibodies is there any point taking vaccine, and is it waste of resources?
- LinuxBender 6y agoThe title should be prefixed with "Ask HN: " You will get a lot of opinions here, but be careful, there is no way to validate anyone's credentials or background. Even then there will be wildly different opinions in the scientific community. You might take a look at nih.gov (Use google to search it) e.g. "site:nih.gov covid-19 antibodies" etc.. to get an idea of some of the studies in play right now. It may be a long time before people can truly answer that question. There are also many variables per-person that come into play. i.e. a persons physiological condition, environment, lifestyle, etc... Medical experts usually default to the lowest common denominator, so the answer you would likely get is to take the vaccine regardless.
- cbhl 6y agoIt really boils down to which of the two is more expensive: giving the vaccine to people who already have had it or giving a test to everybody and the vaccine to people who don't pass the test. It's worth noting that the tests are slightly inaccurate, so a test+vaccine strategy would also fail to vaccinate people who return a false positive on the test. If the vaccine manufacturing supply is not constrained, the capacity for running tests is much lower than the capacity for vaccinating. (Test requires a machine and between 15min for rapid and O(hours) for PCR.) Giving a vaccine is somewhere between one and five minutes per person. (Paperwork, clean site, inject, bandaid, next.) Plus vaccination is much cheaper to scale out -- you just need a few chairs and a folding table and a volunteer to create a flu vaccination station, for example.