A recent study has revealed that a booster dose of Covid-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer/BioNTech or Johnson & Johnson greatly increases antibody levels in those who have had two doses of the CoronaVac vaccine previously produced by China’s Sinovac company.
Brazilian researchers and experts from Oxford University said that the study showed that the Sinovac vaccine received the strongest boost from viral vector or mRNA vaccines, including the Delta and Omicron variants of the Corona virus.
The Sinovac vaccine was produced using an inactivated version of a variant of the Corona virus from a patient in China. The vaccine has been approved in more than 50 countries, including Turkey, Brazil, China, Argentina, South Africa, Oman, Malaysia and Indonesia.
“This study presents important choices to administrators in the many countries where inactivated vaccines are used,” said Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and lead of the study.
However, another study in December found that administering a booster dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after two doses of Sinovac produced a lower immune response to the Omicron variant than to the other variants.
Viral vector vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford and Johnson & Johnson use an attenuated version of another virus to transmit genetic data.
The mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech carry the genetic code for the proteins needed to teach the human body how to defend against infection.
According to the latest research conducted with the participation of 1,240 volunteers in the cities of Sao Paolo and Salvador, Brazil, the third dose of the CoronaVac vaccine developed by Sinovac also increases the amount of antibodies. However, the immune response becomes stronger when different vaccines are used.
Antibody levels of Sinovac were observed to be low before booster vaccines. According to this, only 20.4 percent of adults between the ages of 18-60 and 8.9 percent of adults over the age of 60 had detectable antibodies that inactivated the virus. These rates rose dramatically with each booster vaccine, according to the study. The results of the study were published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet.