Scientists say that some people may never contract the Corona virus thanks to their genes, as researchers from Oxford University found that people with a certain mutation produce a greater response to antibodies following vaccination.
About 30 to 40 percent of people have the gene known as HLA-DQB1*06, and the enhanced protection may be enough to prevent infection completely, and may explain in part why some people don’t contract the virus, even when family members have it.
The United States has the largest number of confirmed cases of any country in the world at 179 million, which is equivalent to more than half of the total population, but this is likely to be inaccurate, because testing was incomplete at the beginning of the outbreak and some people did not They are never tested.
However, there are many anecdotal stories of people who infected their entire family with the virus and avoided infection even following sharing a bed with a sick person.
This group of people has been dubbed “Never Covid” and scientists have never figured out how to manage it.
Lead researcher Dr Alexander Mintzer said: “We’ve seen wide variation in how quickly people test for COVID following vaccination, and our findings suggest that our genetic code may influence how likely this is to happen over time.”
Scientists examined blood samples from people in five different experiments, which looked at 1,600 adults who received the “Pfizer-BioNTech” vaccine or the “AstraZeneca” vaccine as an initial dose, and it was found that individuals who have this gene have a high percentage of proteins that protect the body. There is more virus in their blood than those without this gene.
They also looked at a group of people who took Covid tests every week for more than a year following receiving their first dose, and those with the HLA-DQB1*06 gene were unlikely to have contracted the virus over a 12-month period.
Co-author Professor Julian Knight added: “From this study we have evidence that our genetic makeup is one reason why we differ from one another in our immune response following Covid vaccination.”