Antibodies are proteins created by your immune system that help you fight off infections, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are made after a person has been infected or has been vaccinated against a disease.
While a COVID-19 antibody test can be a useful tool for doctors, with more people getting vaccinated in the U.S., FiveThirtyEight founder and editor-in-chief Nate Silver recently asked on Twitter if it’s possible to tell the difference between COVID-19 antibodies and vaccine antibodies.
The CDC says on its website that antibody tests — also known as serology tests — look for antibodies in your blood that fight the virus that causes COVID-19. Antibody tests might tell you if you had a past infection and should generally not be used to diagnose a current infection.
“There are ways to distinguish antibodies that are generated from the vaccine versus antibodies that are generated from natural infection,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told VERIFY.
According to Dr. Omid Bakhtar, a board-certified pathologist at SHARP Healthcare, the COVID-19 antibody test was created in the early days of the pandemic as a way for doctors to diagnose if someone previously had the coronavirus. It looked for antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, which only appears in those who recovered.
When the COVID-19 vaccines were created, Dr. Bakhtar says researchers wanted a way to determine if the antibodies were taking hold within a person’s immune system. Since the vaccines don’t contain SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the coronavirus, the nucleocapsid test would not work. Instead, the vaccines contain a spike protein, which is found on the surface of the virus that causes COVID-19. A separate antibody test was created to check for that.
Full Article: [ Ссылка ]
Email questions@verifythis.com or text us at 202-410-8808.
Find us on social @verifythis.
Facebook: [ Ссылка ]
Twitter: [ Ссылка ]
Instagram: [ Ссылка ]
