The National Institutes of Health is giving a booster dose to 200 kidney transplant patients who did not have an immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine in a new trial that launched yesterday.
Many transplant patients, who have to take immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting a new organ, don’t produce enough antibodies — or don’t produce antibodies at all — after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The study will check to see if a third shot of an mRNA vaccine, given on top of the normal two-shot regimen, will generate antibodies closer to the levels seen in healthy people.
There are some indications that a third dose might help some people. In France, health officials started recommending in April that immunosuppressed…
