Combination of COVID-19 vaccines (CoviShield and Covaxin) provides high antibody response and is also safe, said city-based AIG Hospitals, which conducted a pilot study with researchers from Asian Healthcare Foundation in November last year .
Hospital President D. Nageswara Reddy said that a total of 330 healthy volunteers, who had not been vaccinated and had no history of COVID-19 infection, were selected for the study and tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. done. Of those, only 44 participants did not have antibodies related to COVID.
Other institutions in India that tried to enroll more participants did not find as many participants without antibodies.
four categories
44 participants were divided into four groups. People in Group 1 were given two doses of Covishield, while those in Group 2 were given two doses of Covaxin.
For participants in the third group, the first dose was Covishield and the second dose was Covaxin. For the fourth group, Covaxin was administered as the first dose and Covishield as the second dose.
All 44 participants were tracked for 60 days to monitor for any adverse effects.
“The most important finding of the study was that the spike-protein neutralizing antibodies detected in the mixed-vaccine groups were significantly higher than those in the same-vaccine groups,” the hospital explained in a press release.
Nageswara Reddy, who was one of the researchers, said that spike-protein neutralizing antibodies are the ones that kill the virus and reduce the overall infectivity. “We found that when the first and second doses were of different vaccines, the spike-protein antibody response was four times higher than when the two doses of the same vaccine were administered,” he said.
Data from the study, conducted with the Indian Council for Medical Research, is to be considered as a reference study from January 10 when deciding on a ‘precautionary’ dose. The researchers said they now intend to expand the sample size.
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