Belly Fat, Smoking, and Hypertension Associated with Reduced Vaccine Effectiveness

According to a European study of health care workers, central obesity (belly fat), smoking habit, and hypertension (high blood pressure) are associated with lower antibody titres in response to a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. The most interesting part is that overall obesity didn’t so much seem to play a role, but specially fat around the waistline did.

From this we get the indication that a person’s metabolic health can have an impact on how your body defends against COVID-19. Just because you get your vaccine, doesn’t mean it’s OK to slack on your exercise, eating whole foods, and sleep.

Though not directly related, it’s also interesting that a CDC article recently noted (in MMWR 70) that the vaccine effectiveness recently declined from 91% to 66% since the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant became predominant. They also say “however, this trend should be interpreted with caution because VE [vaccine effectiveness] might also be declining as time since vaccination increases and because of poor precision in estimates due to limited number of weeks of observation and few infections among participants.”

The video below goes through some more details on the subject.