NEW YORK: In a new study, researchers show that although two doses of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID 19) confers some protection for people who have received solid organ transplants, it's still not enough to enable them to dispense with masks, physical distancing and other safety measures.

The new study at Johns Hopkins University in the US evaluated this immunogenic response following the second dose of either of the two messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines -- made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech -- for 658 transplant recipients, none of whom had a prior diagnosis of COVID-19. The participants completed their two-dose regimen between Dec. 16, 2020, and March 13, 2021.

The findings are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). "Transplant recipients should not assume that two vaccine doses guarantee sufficient immunity against SARS-CoV-2 any more than it did after just one dose," said Dorry Segev, Professor of Surgery and Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School o f Medicine.

The researchers also found that among the participants, the most likely to develop an antibody response were younger, did not take immune suppressive regimens including anti-metabolite drugs and received the Moderna vaccine. These were similar to the associations seen in the March single-dose study.

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