A man in the UK received a vaccine against him COVID-19 as a treatment after he tested positive for the coronavirus for several months. However, instead of preventing, the vaccine managed to cure one person of COVID-19.
Doctors at the Welsh Immunodeficiency Center decided to use two doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine
The vaccine successfully caused his immune responsemarking what is believed to be the first time the vaccine has been used for the treatment instead of prevention. The case study was published in the Journal of Clinical Immunology.
“I was feeling very frustrated and beginning to doubt that I would ever turn negative,” Ian Lester, 37, said in a statement.
Lester is a dispensing optician in Wales who has the Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that reduces your body’s response to infection. continued to give positive for COVID-19 for more than 7 months after contracting the virus and had waves of symptoms. These include chest tightness, insomnia, headaches, poor concentration, and extreme fatigue.
“I started to feel like a prisoner in my own house,” he said. “Days turned into months.”
Doctors at the Welsh Immunodeficiency Center decided to use two doses of the Pfizer vaccine to treat Lester. And scientists at Cardiff University monitored the response of his immune system. The virus was finally eliminated from his body.
The vaccine probably stimulated your immune system
The vaccine probably stimulated his immune systemaccording to doctors, who hope the approach could be used for other patients who have impaired immune systems.
Lester first tested positive in December 2020 and had few symptoms at first, the most notable being lack of taste and smell. He then told his immunologist, who expressed concern that the people with an impaired immune system they may remain contagious for longer than usual.
Lester received home swab kits to monitor his condition. The symptoms slowly worsened over time, she said.
After almost 5 months, the doctors decided to give him the two-dose Pfizer vaccine, each one a month apart. They saw a strong antibody response and a strong T-cell response. Lester finally tested negative 72 days after the first dose of the vaccine and 218 days since he first tested positive.
“It was quite an amazing moment,” Mark Ponsford, MD, a scientist at Cardiff University School of Medicine, said in the statement.
“Most importantly, the vaccine was well tolerated by the patient and successfully induced a strong antibody and T-cell response,” he said. “This was remarkable given that Ian’s response to conventional vaccines in the past has been extremely limited.”
researchers now plan to reproduce the work to confirm the link and to see if this method could be used for other patients who have a weakened immune system.
“While genetic causes of immunodeficiency are rare, there are many more people whose immune systems have been suppressed due to their medical conditions and treatments,” Ponsford said. “We should be alert to persistent COVID-19 infection in this setting and develop the tools to respond accordingly.”
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