DCU Professor of Immunology Christine Loscher joined Off The Ball on Wednesday to discuss potential fallout for Ireland with unvaccinated players.
The FAI are encouraging all of their Ireland players to get the Covid-19 vaccination.
Ireland International Callum Robinson is one of many players in Stephen Kenny's squad who remains unvaccinated. Robinson admitted such on Wednesday without sufficient explanation as to why. He simply argued that it is his personal choice without being able to explain how he came to that choice.
Robinson is just one figure in a much larger story. Vaccination rates amongst Premier League players are shockingly low, according to recent reports.
Surpassed the health impacts, unvaccinated players also impact the squads they join. Since Robinson is unvaccinated, if he is now a close contact with someone who has Covid, he can't play. If he's vaccinated, he'd be able to play. He will also face different travel restrictions.
Ireland Under-21 Manager Jim Crawford has had to name two different squads for his upcoming fixtures because of travel restrictions.
Kenny's senior squad has already dealt with Covid outbreaks that impacted player availability in crucial qualifiers.
To get a better understanding of Robinson's situation and how unvaccinated players could impact future team selections, Joe Molloy talked to DCU Professor of Immunology Christine Loscher.
"It's difficult when you're dealing with groups of people," she said.
"I think the fact that he's had it twice would possibly point to maybe the first time he didn't have a particularly good immune response. Which means he didn't have a great deal of protection and was unlucky enough to get it again.
"That may mean his immune response the second time won't give him very much protection in the future."
Loscher says that we can't measure each individual's immune response. The fact that Robinson caught Covid a second time suggests his immune response was weak. Each individual has a different response after catching Covid.
"In terms of mixing groups of people that are vaccinated and unvaccinated, vaccination protects you from a severe form of the illness and any complications that go with it. That's the primary goal of vaccination. It's to reduce severe illness and deaths.
"If you are vaccinated, the more that you are exposed to people who are potentially carrying the virus, the higher chance you have of eventually getting a breakthrough infection. So if you constantly have a group of people, some of whom are not vaccinated and therefore have a higher risk of carrying the virus, if you expose vaccinated people to them consistently, there's a higher chance that you'll get a breakthrough infection.
"This is what the potential situation is for teams of players.
"The constant mixing puts everyone at a higher risk for breakthrough infection."
The vaccination is optional. It's not compulsory. It is still an option for members of the public and professional athletes alike. But Robinson's suggestion that it's just a personal choice is a suggestion that his choice only impacts him.
According to science and those who have studied diseases for their whole professional lives, that's simply not true.
Players need to recognize how being unvaccinated impacts others. But they also need to understand their fitness doesn't protect them the way some think it does.
"Because they are elite athletes...they have a belief that their immune system is really powerful...there's lots of evidence in young healthy males and females that thought they were healthy and got the virus then had severe complications.
"Until you get it, you have no way of knowing and no way of predicting how your body will react."
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