how to get curl to output only http response body (json) and no other headers etc

You are specifying the -i option:

-i, --include

(HTTP) Include the HTTP-header in the output. The HTTP-header includes things like server-name, date of the document, HTTP-version and more...

Simply remove that option from your command line:

response=$(curl -sb -H "Accept: application/json" "http://host:8080/some/resource")