HIV+ Immunosuppressed and the COVID Vaccine Effectiveness

by Lynda Sagrestano, Ph.D., Christina Blanchard-Horan, Ph.D., Marsha Greene, Ph.D., Jabin Sharma, MHM, MS, BS, CRA, Peter Mugyenyi MD

If you caught the last article we wrote on COVID HIV and the Immunosuppressed where new research was released on transplant patients and the vaccine efficacy, this won't be new news. It further establishes the problem that people with immunosuppressed systems are at a higher risk of COVID and the vaccine is less effective because of it. This article will dive a little further into the issue and provide the research as it is released.

In March this article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), by Boyarsky, Werbel, and Avery et al. It looks at the antibody response after the second dose for transplant recipients. The median age of participants was 66 with an average of 8 years since their transplant. The data suggest that a substantial proportion of transplant recipients were likely to remain at risk for COVID-19 after 2 doses of the Maderna mRNA vaccine.

What exactly does that mean for the person who is HIV positive? More studies are needed to address interventions to improve vaccine response, such as booster doses. The same may be true for other people with compromised immune systems.

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