Transplants and Covid

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Anchor lead: Transplant recipients may not respond well to Covid vaccines, Elizabeth Tracey reports

People who’ve received organ transplants don’t produce the antibody response to their first dose of an mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 seen in others, research by Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown. Segev says that if the recipient was on a drug to prevent rejection called an antimetabolite, the response was even lower.

Segev: if we look at immunocompetent people, if you give them the first dose of the mRNA vaccine by two to three weeks afterwards nearly 100% of immunocompetent people will have an antibody response. What we found was in immunosuppressed transplant patients only 17% have an antibody response to dose one, and if you’re on an antimetabolite, only 8% have an immune response to dose one, and that is frightening.  :27

Segev says in the short term transplant recipients should be even more vigilant than ever regarding their exposure to Covid-19. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.