Like a superpower. Scientists say some people develop “superhuman immunity” after being infected with Covid-19.
This immunity is “of an impressive power”, details the immunologist Shane Crotty. To support his thesis, he published a study in June in the journal Science, relayed by American radio. NPR this week.
Concretely, he explains that “superhuman immunity” consists in producing very high levels of antibodies, with great flexibility. People who develop it after being sick thus become very resistant to the virus, but also to all its variants.
Immune after an RNA vaccine?
Who has this “superhuman immunity”? Nothing has been finalized yet, but it seems that people infected with the coronavirus in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines this year, such as Pfizer or Moderna, are the most concerned. Scientists do not yet know if all people in this case develop “superhuman immunity”.
“We have only studied this phenomenon with a few patients, because it is an extremely laborious and difficult examination”, justifies the virologist Theodora Hatziioannou, interviewed by NPR. The researchers are however optimistic, because such immunity could prove to be crucial in the fight against Covid-19.
“We can reasonably predict that these people will be fairly well protected against most – and perhaps all – of the variants of SRARS-Cov-2 (the Covid-19 virus) likely to appear in the future”, specifies the virologist Paul Bieniasz at NPR. “It’s a bit speculative, but I also suspect that they would have some degree of protection against SARS-like viruses that have not yet infected humans.”