breaking news! scientists from YALE demands vaccinated people getting tested, says vaccinated people need a "special test"

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Scientists would prefer that the average vaccinated person not get antibody testing at all, on the grounds that it is unnecessary. In clinical trials, the vaccines authorized in the United States provoked a strong antibody response in virtually all of the participants.

“Most people shouldn’t even be worrying about this,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.



If you must get tested or just want to, it is essential to get the right kind of test.

“I feel a little bit hesitant to recommend everybody getting tested, because unless they really understood what the test is doing, people might get this wrong sense of not having developed any antibodies,” Iwasaki said.



Early in the pandemic, many commercial tests were designed to look for antibodies to a coronavirus protein called the nucleocapsid, or just N, because after infection, those antibodies were plentiful in the blood.

But these antibodies are not as powerful as those required to prevent virus infection, nor do they last as long. More importantly, antibodies to the N protein are not produced by the vaccines authorized in the United States; instead, those vaccines provoke antibodies to another protein sitting on the surface of the virus, called the spike.

If people who were never infected are vaccinated and then are tested for antibodies to the N protein instead of the spike, they may be in for a rude shock.

David Lat, a 46-year-old legal writer in New York City, was hospitalized for COVID-19 for three weeks in March 2020, and he chronicled most of his illness and recovery on Twitter.

Over the next year, Lat was tested for antibodies numerous times — when he went to his pulmonologist or cardiologist for follow-ups, for example, or to donate plasma. His antibody levels were high in June 2020 but steadily fell over the following months.

The decline “didn’t worry me,” Lat recalled recently. “I had been told to expect that they would naturally wane, but I was just happy that I was still positive.”

Lat was fully vaccinated by March 22 of this year.