E-Paper
Covid-19: Will vaccines be equally effective for older people?
Anti-ageing drugs could fight Covid-19 among older population, researchers suggest.
With several vaccine candidates undergoing various stages of human trials in the world, the efficacy of the vaccines among older people is now being questioned and discussed. While most of the trials by major pharma giants include older participants, the tilt is mostly towards young participants. Also, many older participants are at the risk of getting excluded from the trial because of other ailments.
Moderna has reported that in its first phase trial, the vaccine candidate produced same results in younger and older population. China’s Sinovac, too, said its vaccines are working with same efficacy in older population as well. But the Pfizer vaccine was reported to have worked doubly better in younger population, indicating that one vaccine may not solve the Covid-19 crisis for all.
According to researchers, anti-ageing supplements which reverses the ageing process and thereby improves immunity can be a solution to this problem.
“The most exciting and potentially impactful technologies to treat Covid-19 are those that activate the body’s defences against ageing. It may even be possible to reset the age of cells and tissues so currently high-risk individuals can respond to viral infections as though they were young,” a Harvard paper has claimed.
In a young person, immune cells recognise the SARS-CoV-2 virus when it first enters the upper respiratory tract. “For the immune system to effectively suppress, then eliminate SARS-CoV-2, it must perform four main tasks: (1) recognize, (2) alert, (3) destroy and (4) clear. Each of these mechanisms are known to be dysfunctional and increasingly heterogeneous in the elderly, but which aspect is most relevant to COVID-19 progression is not known,” the paper said.
