Some people just have an exceptionally strong innate immune system, and that manages to kill things off before they manage to become established. Does being vacin ated make this kind of transient infection or early killing off of the virus more likely? Yes, probably it does. There's been a lot of media focus on breakthrough infections, that is, people getting infected with covid even though they've been vaccinated. But i think it creates perception that vaccines are only any good at protecting against severe disease - when in fact we're still very effective at preventing people from being infected in the first place. It's just they're not as effective as we originally thought they would be.
Although several countries around the world continue to have high rates of Covid-19 infections, including the UK and US, many of their citizens are yet to be infected with the Sars-Cov-2 virus. This includes countless individuals who have knowingly been exposed, often multiple times, but have still never had a positive test. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Linda Geddes about how scientists are trying to solve the mystery of why some people seemingly don’t catch Covid, and what could be behind this phenomenon. Help support our independent journalism at
theguardian.com/sciencepod