Surviving the virus ‘doesn’t guarantee you’re immune’

Having been infected with the coronavirus does not guarantee immunity after recovery and even if it does, it is unclear for how long, says Professor Helen Rees.

The executive director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute was speaking on the need of a coronavirus vaccine and the processes of finding it.

She said the only way to break the cycle of the global pandemic was to develop a vaccine, as there was uncertainty on whether antibodies could develop in the body to fight off the virus.

“Even if people who have had Covid-19 have antibodies, at the moment we can’t say definitely whether those antibodies will protect people at all. Some might. Some antibodies might not be as good. Some people may have lower levels of antibodies and some few people we can’t detect antibodies at all.

“Having had the infection isn’t a guarantee of having antibodies that will protect you – and even if they did, we don’t know for how long,” she said.

A vaccine would prime the immune system to recognise the virus once a person was infected to enable it to either kick it out, or control the infection into a mild one. But first, a “good candidate vaccine”, which was already shelved in the laboratories with the potential to work against the coronavirus, should be found.

“Then, you do various other tests in the laboratory and in some cases, you do tests on some animals to see if this is likely to work in an animal model. And then you go into clinical trials,” she said.

Clinical trials have been rolled out in China, the UK and the US on a small number of healthy volunteers who are given different doses of the vaccine to assess its response and its safety. Once satisfactory, the trials move to larger groups of several hundred people to see if it makes the body create an immune response.

“That is the kind of study we are going to start doing in South Africa quite soon.

“Once the vaccine passes that test, it goes to thousands of people to see if the vaccine is going to be protective of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which is the virus that causes Covid-19.”

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