Do we already have a vaccine to prevent COVID-19?
A recent study published in the American Journal of Microbiology journal, MBIO, suggests that MMR 2 vaccine helps to prevent COVID-19 symptoms. It’s a study based on a small population (80), but the MMR blood titers show a very strong association with the severity of COVID-19 illness. People with high titers were all asymptomatic. Everyone who became severely ill had titers under 32. This wasn’t the first article exploring this idea of an association between MMR vaccination and COVID-19 resistance. But it’s an intriguing one that deserves more attention and research.
As a press release from the American Journal of Microbiology states, this could also explain why children don’t seem to get seriously ill. The MMR blood titers fall as you age. And the elderly may never have had this vaccine, in part because they’ve had measles or mumps. One significant point to the study was that having had the mumps doesn’t protect you. People need to have the vaccine itself. This contradicts the argument of vaccine critics who say that it’s better to have natural immunity. But in this case, the vaccine seems to give better immunity. As someone who had mumps as a child (and then gave it to my sister) I’m in favor of a vaccine-based approach to public health, rather than natural or herd-immunity.
I want to emphasize again that this study was based on the MMR blood titer results of only eighty people who had COVID-19. So this is a preliminary study. But the risks of the MMR are very low; at least hundreds of millions of people have had it since it was first introduced in 1971. Please note that this study only examined the MMR 2, not the quad vax, which also includes varicella.
Even though new COVID vaccines are coming soon, it will take months to roll the out at scale. It would be wonderful if we could use an existing vaccine with a long track record for safety to help us to buy time.