Two years have passed since Covid-19 erupted onto the global stage, disrupting our lives and killing more than 5.5 million people worldwide.
And it’s just over a year since the UK’s coronavirus vaccine programme began, saving well over 100,000 lives, as well as preventing countless others from ending up in hospital and suffering long-term damage from Covid.
And yet there are still about five million people in the UK who choose not to be vaccinated. Many seem convinced that either they are not at risk or that ‘natural’ immunity will save them.
People such as the unvaccinated consultant Dr Steve James, who made the headlines last week when he confronted the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, over the Government’s decision to make having a Covid vaccination by April a condition of working on the NHS frontline.
It’s just over a year since the UK’s coronavirus vaccine programme began, saving well over 100,000 lives, as well as preventing countless others from ending up in hospital and suffering long-term damage from Covid
Indeed, it is thought that there are tens of thousands of unvaccinated frontline NHS staff, who now have less than three weeks to get their first jab, which they must have by February 3 if they are to be double vaccinated by the Government deadline of April 1.
Dr James was objecting to mandatory vaccines against Covid, despite the fact that he, and other doctors working with vulnerable patients in the NHS, have already had to prove to their hospital trust that they have been vaccinated against hepatitis, an unpleasant and highly infectious virus (though not as infectious as Covid).
Dr James claimed that ‘the science is not strong enough’ and that he didn’t need a vaccine because he had antibodies, showing he had acquired some ‘natural’ immunity through infection.
Meanwhile, the unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic used a similar argument to get into Australia — claiming an exemption on the grounds that he had Covid in December and would, therefore, be protected by his antibodies.
The trouble with this argument is that, firstly, the unvaccinated and unboosted make up the majority of those in intensive care. And secondly, just because you have antibodies against a previous strain of Covid, that does not mean you are protected against catching, or spreading it to more vulnerable people such as patients with cancer or pregnant women.
A study published in December, by researchers from Imperial College London, concluded that the protection against Omicron, if you have had a prior Covid infection ‘may be as low as 19 per cent’. A course of vaccines — the double dose plus the booster — on the other hand, offers something like 75 per cent protection.
Why the difference? It appears that our immune systems are very good at learning from experience. The more often your immune system is challenged by a virus (or a vaccine, which is mimicking that virus), the better it gets at defending itself against it.
The first time your immune system encounters a virus it isn’t quite sure how to react and it takes time to start building an effective response. While that is happening, the virus is busy replicating, spreading and doing damage.
If you’re lucky, your immune system will spring into action and you will recover after a trivial illness. If you are unlucky, you end up in hospital, perhaps in intensive care. The idea of a vaccine is that your immune system gets the nudge to start working long before you are exposed to the real thing.
The reason for a second, and even third jab, is this amplifies and refines your immune response to protect you, and others, in the future.
Multiple exposures seems to be particularly effective at educating your T-cells, immune cells responsible for seeking out and killing dangerous viruses, and which are vital for conferring long-term immunity. T-cells also seem to be much better than antibodies at detecting
