How well do vaccines protect against the new variants of the coronavirus? This is a question we – a group of scientists and doctors in Nottingham – set about answering earlier this year, having collected blood samples from a number of nurses and doctors throughout the pandemic.

We started taking blood from healthcare workers back in April 2020, at the peak of the first wave, to see how many of them had been infected with the coronavirus and what their levels of antibodies were. 

We followed up with them in the summer and then again in the autumn, so we knew exactly who had had COVID-19 and when.

We then asked a group of them to give us blood samples after they had received their first and second vaccine doses. We measured their antibody levels after each dose, and also specifically their levels of neutralizing antibodies, which are those that attack and nullify the virus.

Neutralizing antibodies attach to a virus in a way that prevents it from infecting cells. The higher the levels of neutralizing antibodies against a variant of the coronavirus, the less likely that a person will become infected or get severe COVID-19 from that variant.

To measure neutralization, we used a mouse virus called MLV.

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