The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine may be less effective in obese people. This is evident from an Italian study.
The researchers found that seriously overweight healthcare workers produced only about half the number of antibodies after a second dose of the vaccine compared to healthy people. It was a small study, but it may mean that obese people need an extra dose to make sure they are truly protected against Covid-19.
Precisely because obesity (a BMI of over 30) increases the chance of dying from the coronavirus by almost 50 percent, it is important that the vaccine works properly. The findings are actually not all that surprising: the flu vaccine is also only half as effective in obese people. The new study, which has yet to receive a peer review, provides the first evidence that the corona vaccines suffer from the same problem.
“We already knew that a high BMI is a huge predictor of a poor immune response to vaccines, so this paper is very interesting, even though the dataset is small,” Imperial College London immunology professor Danny Altmann told The Guardian. “It confirms that a vaccinated population is not synonymous with an immune population, especially in a country with high obesity rates.”
Bron (nen): The Guardian
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