BUFFALO (WBEN) - There is growing optimism that an already commonly administered vaccine could provide some protection against COVID-19.
A recently published study in the ASM Journal mBio looked at individuals who received the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to observe the antibody response to the rubella or mumps virus, and depending on the levels of the antibodies, the correlating severity of disease due to COVID, according to Chief of Infectious Disease at the Jacobs School of Medicine, Dr. Tom Russo.
"What they found is that those individuals that had the highest level of antibodies directed against mumps had the least severe COVID disease," said Russo. "This is intriguing and suggests, and the key word here is 'suggests' in this relatively small study, that vaccination, the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, may confer some protection against the disease due to the new coronavirus."
But how?
In the simplest possible terms, Russo said there's biological plausibility - in the mumps virus, one of the proteins contains about 29% similarity to some of the surface proteins on the coronavirus.
"That's a fairly low level of homology, but that is sort of the initial basis of why people are speculating, if this observation holds up, what may be going on," he said.
Russo cautions people not to get too far ahead of themselves in thinking a recent MMR shot will certainly provide protection, noting this was a small, observational study and there are ongoing clinical trials taking place.
"We need to wait for the clinical data," said Russo. "This is preliminary at this point, it's hypothesis generating, but we are not there yet in terms of clearly establishing cause and effect."
