The race for the Coronavirus vaccine continues to advance , whose arrival would represent the beginning of the “end” of the pandemic, however, some experts believe that not everyone will receive the same type of immunity or that the vaccine will not have the same efficiency in all people by a simple factor: obesity .
Since the beginning of the pandemic, obesity has been reported to increase the risk for people to become infected with Coronavirus , in addition to increasing the likelihood of developing severe symptoms. Epidemiologist Lin Xu from Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, found that the pattern of high body mass indexes was associated with more severe cases of Covid and countries like Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of obesity in the population, faced dozens of serious cases because the patients suffered from this physical condition.
Obesity vs diseases
The reason why people with obesity are more likely to die from Coronavirus may be due to different factors, such as that they may have low lung capacity, it can be difficult to connect them to a ventilator, in addition to physiological factors, since adipose tissue expresses high levels of the receptor that the Coronavirus uses to enter cells, in addition to the fact that in diabetic people, insulin would play an important role in the metabolic effects of the infection.
Donna Ryan, an obesity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, points out that not only can this condition worsen Coronavirus symptoms , but could even cause people not to receive as strong protection as is sought in the vaccine of Coronavirus . However, she notes that she, like other experts, are concerned that clinical trials are not designed to note the problems that can arise from the vaccine in obese people. “It’s something the experts really have to look at.”
This, due to the main effects on the immune system, since obesity can cause chronic inflammation of low levels, which can cause diabetes and heart disease, which results in high levels of regulatory proteins of the immune system, whose responses can damage healthy tissue in some cases of Coronavirus , according to Milena Sokoslowska, an immunology expert at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Likewise, Daniel Drucker, an expert at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, points out that people with obesity can have a Coronavirus infection for up to five days longer than people who are not, which would suggest that these people have a problem getting rid of infection or creating normal viral defenses, raising further questions about the Coronavirus vaccine.
