334 - COVID-19 Vaccines and Immunocompromised People: Fully Vaccinated And Not Protected
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After being fully vaccinated, only 50% of people who are immunocompromised show an antibody response against COVID-19, compared with 100% of those with a typical immune system. Hopkins transplant surgeon Dr. Dorry Segev talks with Stephanie Desmon about how the immune response is blunted in individuals taking medications for organ transplants or who have overactive immune systems, what antibody tests can and can't tell us, and whether a third dose of vaccines could help the millions of Americans who remain unprotected from COVID despite being fully vaccinated.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.5 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. |
| 0:50.1 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Johns Hopkins transplant surgeon, Dr. Dori Segev, about his research |
| 0:55.8 | into people who are fully vaccinated against COVID, but because of their compromised immune |
| 1:01.1 | systems are not protected from the virus. Let's listen. |
| 1:05.6 | Dori Segev, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:07.6 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:08.9 | So today I want to talk to you about the immunocompromised |
| 1:13.8 | and the COVID vaccine, because there are these categories of people who are fully vaccinated |
| 1:18.9 | but aren't protected from COVID. So please tell me about that. So, you know, the COVID vaccines |
| 1:26.0 | are a huge celebration, right? We've somehow made this vaccine that's unbelievably good and that works in nearly everybody with normal immune systems. And it's this huge celebration of effectiveness. But there's a problem in that for a vaccine to work, it needs your immune system |
| 1:46.1 | to do its thing, right? So it's activating your immune system to create B-cell responses, T-cell |
| 1:53.1 | responses, antibody responses, et cetera. And there are people, millions of them in the United States, |
| 1:58.8 | and in particular transplant patients, the ones I take care of, |
| 2:01.8 | who take immunosuppression medications. They take medications that specifically target certain parts of the |
| 2:08.8 | immune system, for example, to prevent you from getting an organ rejection or to prevent your |
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