Published in the Lancet Microbe with Prof Ben Cowling and Prof Gabriel Leung, the study has found that recipients of the BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine have 10 times more antibodies than those who took Sinovac.
The study reports comparative data on SARS-CoV-2 vaccine immunogenicity in health-care workers in Hong Kong who received either the BNT162b2 vaccine (Comirnaty; Fosun–BioNTech) or the inactivated virus (vero cell) vaccine (Coronavac; Sinovac).
They have collected blood samples before vaccination, before the second dose, and 21–35 days after the second dose, testing samples for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 using an ELISA to detect antibodies that bind to the receptor binding domain of the spike protein, testing ELISA-positive samples for neutralising antibodies with a surrogate virus neutralisation (sVNT) assay, and then a plaque reduction neutralisation test (PRNT) with live SARS-CoV-2 virus.
