You will have heard a lot in the news about vaccines, and some of you might know some people who have received a vaccine against Covid-19.
The vaccines being administered here are not for children, but last week trials began in the UK and United States to find out how children respond to the vaccines.
Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognise and combat either viruses or bacteria.
Some vaccines against Covid-19, like the Oxford/AstraZeneca and the Johnson and Johnson vaccines, introduce your cells to a part of a disease cell. Your cells then figure out how to destroy it, and that immune response is triggered when we meet that same disease in the real world.
“I don’t think this means that Ireland is under pressure to reverse their decision, I think they’ll consider what they’re saying, but Ireland has access to three vaccines at the moment so we can consider who gets what,” Prof Lavelle told Morning Ireland.
“What they did was they looked at the immune responses [to the AstraZeneca vaccine], so they looked at the T cell and B cell responses in that trial across all age sectors and found that they were comparable in under 65s and over 65s. It’s not certainty, but in their minds it was predictive that it would be effective in over 65s.