July 15, 2021

expert reaction to preprint giving the final results from round 6 of the REACT-2 study on COVID-19 antibody prevalence in England

A preprint, an unpublished non-peer reviewed paper from the REACT-2 programme, looked at prevalence of antibody positivity to SARS-CoV-2 in over 207,000 people between 12 and 25 May 2021.

This Roundup accompanied an SMC Briefing.

Prof James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and University of Oxford, said:

“These data have a message that should trouble the conscience of this country.

“People who identify as having black ethnicity have lower rates of vaccination and higher rates of infection (judged by antibodies).

“This is a very large discrepancy.  I am not qualified to comment on the reasons for it, but I can say that this means this community is at significantly more risk from the current covid19 wave.

“It is leaders and role models of this community that we should ask (and listen to) for advice on how we as a country can solve this problem.

“Current approaches are not working well enough for this community.

“People from all ethnicities in the most deprived quintile also have lower vaccination rates and higher infection rates.

“We need to do better for our fellow citizens, pop up vaccination centres seem to have had some success.  More effort and imagination is needed.”

Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, UEA, said:

“This preprint refers to samples collected from the 12th to 25th of May so relates to the pandemic as it was 7 or 8 weeks ago.  More recent data on antibody prevalence was published by ONS on 7th July  covering the period 14th to 20th June.

“So this report though interesting is largely of historic interest and finds similar conclusions to the ONS report covering that period.  It should not be used to indicate the current situation especially as delta variant has since become dominant and we have seen the short term large surge in infection rates in late June.”

Preprint (not a paper): ‘Vaccine uptake and SARS-CoV-2 antibody prevalence among 207,337 adults during May 2021 in England: REACT-2 study’ by Helen Ward et al. was posted online at 00:01 UK time on Thursday 15 July 2021.  This work is not peer-reviewed.

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.