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Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

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Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#11
IMO, this illustrates a major problem with the current approach to Covid vaccine research.

With most vaccines on the market, the effect of vaccination according to the recommended schedule is tested for real: actual disease outcomes are studied and the vaccine schedule is determined accordingly. For example, people who get both measles vaccine doses largely don’t get measles (and largely is quantified). People who get two doses of the chickenpox vaccine don’t get chickenpox [0].

With the Covid vaccines, for some reason public health authorities are okay with flying blind. The effect of, say, bivalent boosters on their recipients’ blood neutralizing viruses and virus-like imitation viruses are studied in the lab (but even the studies of this effect by the vaccine makers are barely public and seem to consist mostly of press releases). Studies on actual infections rates seem to be almost completely absent.

And now we have this study, which at least gives a plausible mechanism by which repeated mRNA vaccination could fail to improve actual immunity or maybe even reduce it.

What we need is a real study of whether vaccine recipients on different schedules get sick and how sick. And these need to be well designed, ongoing, and public.

For what it’s worth, IgG4 production is observed in allergy patients receiving immunotherapy, which consists essentially of very frequent repeated vaccination against allergens.

[0] The chickenpox vaccine is incredibly effective against chickenpox — it makes any of the Covid vaccines look pathetic. But, to be fair, the effect of chickenpox vaccination on shingles seems to only slowly coming in to focus by real studies. But to give the FDA credit, figuring this out takes multi-decade studies.

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#12
Ok, well then it might turn out that some of the fringe scientists were right all along. A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine, I only got Covid after a third booster and I don’t think I could have had it any worse.

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#13

Ok, well then it might turn out that some of the fringe scientists were right all along. A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine, I only got Covid after a third booster and I don’t think I could have had it any worse.

> A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine

If you mean “might” instead of “would probably”, then maybe I’d agree that you’re on the right track.

> I don’t think I could have had it any worse.

You’re alive and you haven’t described severe disability lasting at least a year, so this part is just not correct.

Being healthy and young reduces the risk of severe outcomes, but not to zero.

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#14
post #13

Ok, well then it might turn out that some of the fringe scientists were right all along. A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine, I only got Covid after a third booster and I don’t think I could have had it any worse.

> A healthy young male like me would probably have been far better off to not receive any kind of vaccine If you mean “might” instead of “would probably”, then maybe I’d agree that you’re on the right track. > I don’t think I could have had it any worse. You’re alive and you haven’t described severe disability lasting at least a year, so this part is just not correct. Being healthy and young reduces the risk of sever…

It’s all hypothetical at this point, I reluctantly followed the guidance, more or less because I didn’t want to be inconvenienced too much. You are right I could have suffered worse, but then again I have absolutely no risk factors and statistically my chance of death or serious outcome was very close to zero regardless of vaccine status.

There was a clear indication from the data in Israel that nothing was working as it was advertised in Europe. Now high profile publications are coming out that confirm some of the worst fears, so who knows maybe at some point these people will have to take some accountability.

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#15
post #11

IMO, this illustrates a major problem with the current approach to Covid vaccine research. With most vaccines on the market, the effect of vaccination according to the recommended schedule is tested for real: actual disease outcomes are studied and the vaccine schedule is determined accordingly. For example, people who get both measles vaccine doses largely don’t get measles (and largely is quantified). People who ge…

> With the Covid vaccines, for some reason public health authorities are okay with flying blind.

The worst part is with politicians who are okay with forcing the general public to trust the sight of these blind public health authorities.

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#16

ELI5 : what does it mean in practice for vaccine and booster schedules ? Are we heading towards "no less than one booster every year" ? Or the contrary ? Would it change the frequency / severity of side effects with successive boosters ? Basically, is it "good" news, "bad" news, or just, news ? (To clarify in case that's what caused the downvotes : I'm not writing "bad" news because I think vaccines are "bad". If we…

Here's my ELI5 attempt. Disclaimer: the immune system is very complex, even experts really don't understand it as much as we think we do. This is a very simplified view of the system, but I think captures a very large fraction of the story. Let's focus on three types of antibodies - the things your immune system creates in response to a foreign object in your body - for this story: 1) IgM - this is created in your mu…

Thanks for the explanation. Although, as I understand it, I do not see how it can be anything else than a worst case scenario ?

When someone inevitably spins it as "they sold you vaccines that will let you catch the disease _more_ often, we told you so, subscribe to my podcast / buy my book / vote for me / etc...", what is the counterargument ? That we need more data to confirm ? That there can be other factors causing the reinfections ?

At this point, I'm looking forward for someone saying "it's more complicated than that", which is not a great sign :/

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#17
post #6

Fwiw non-inflammatory antibodies could still incapacitate the virii when they attach to their spikes, if they are enough concentrated in the blood. So, what about it? Is this effect powerful enough to be helpful?

Some argue that precisely that mechanism generates evolutionary pressure for the virus to mutate so as to avoid being attached to by the antibodies but still being able to enter the cell (maybe through a different receptor, and there exist some viable candidates for this). The fact that such a large population has been vaccinated with mRNA vaccines, it is thought, has created a huge reservoir for the virus to attempt such a mutation because all those people get infected and shed the virus while being mostly asymptomatic or experiencing mild symptoms. New strains should soon appear if this is correct, and some other dire predictions are made in that case (see Geert Vanden Bossche).

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#18

ELI5 : what does it mean in practice for vaccine and booster schedules ? Are we heading towards "no less than one booster every year" ? Or the contrary ? Would it change the frequency / severity of side effects with successive boosters ? Basically, is it "good" news, "bad" news, or just, news ? (To clarify in case that's what caused the downvotes : I'm not writing "bad" news because I think vaccines are "bad". If we…

It isn't news. It's science. "Further investigations are needed to clarify the precise immunological mechanisms driving this response and to evaluate whether an IgG4-driven antibody response affects subsequent viral infections and booster vaccinations. This is not only relevant for potential future vaccine campaigns against SARS-CoV-2, but also for new mRNA-based vaccine developments against other pathogens."

Well, it's science because it's the result from a study published in a respected peer reviewed journal.

However, it's also "news", because the hypothesis that getting boosted could make you _more_ sick is pretty, well, say, novel.

(Hypothesis still to be confirmed, I get it, but if I understand the other comments correctly,that's the jist of it ?)

Also, in médecine, pretty much anything that goes into the direction of "more sick people" is, well, "bad" news ? Again, maybe there is a silver lining here, and I don't know enough about the topic.

Or maybe it's just a "Burn After Reading" thing.

"I guess we learned not to do it again" ? (except, no, we'll have to do it again, and FSM knows what would have happened if...)

[1] https://youtu.be/SlA9hmrC8DU

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#19
Before everybody from the more esoteric communities chines in with some new reason why we all should immunize "naturally", let's not oversee that breakthrough infections were triggering the same effect.

Also, in general you don't want your immune system to be more aggressive/destructive than necessary when you consider having to rebuild tissue afterwards, which also might include more risks the older you get.

In the case if an infection not seeming life-threatening to your body, a softening of the overall reaction might actually just be the right path to persue. The question is whether we want that in this case or whether we want to further move that towards a more protective optimum in the future with these insights.

For the "I knew it" and "we should have waited" discussion, I personally prefer an early protection, even with a lower reaction, that still keeps me from being hospitalized over being nakedly exposed like we were in the early days of that pandemic. We might have forgotten about this with the current "mild" Omicron variant.

I would love to see the study include severe breakthrough infections, if there are any, to see if the dampening effect and antibody distribution would be different in these cases.

Re: Class switch towards non-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after vaccination

#20
post #17
post #6

Fwiw non-inflammatory antibodies could still incapacitate the virii when they attach to their spikes, if they are enough concentrated in the blood. So, what about it? Is this effect powerful enough to be helpful?

Some argue that precisely that mechanism generates evolutionary pressure for the virus to mutate so as to avoid being attached to by the antibodies but still being able to enter the cell (maybe through a different receptor, and there exist some viable candidates for this). The fact that such a large population has been vaccinated with mRNA vaccines, it is thought, has created a huge reservoir for the virus to attempt…

Interesting, however the emergence of new strains would happen anyway and is not tied to the validity of this hypothesis (thus you could not e.g. use the appearance of new strains as a confirmation of it).

But did you mean "strains that are not using the spike protein anymore to enter cells"?

In which case, why do you think it would be harder to tackle than the original virus?

In my opinion, the same work (developing again mRNA vaccines etc) could also apply to any other receptor, couldn't they?

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