Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the correlation between covid-19 infection and an increase in antibodies after contracting that virus.

For the vast majority of people, COVID-19 induces a robust antibody response to natural infection within three weeks, which persists through to around three to six months. People with recent COVID-19 infection experience greater antibody levels following one dose of vaccine than those without recent infection. Work is ongoing to determine whether antibodies generated against currently prevalent COVID-19 variants will also protect against new variants. The correlate of protection for COVID-19 is not known yet, but evidence to date suggests that the levels of antibody strongly correlate with protection against future infections.