Antibody test

[redsturgeon]

Mrs RS decided to check the state of her antibodies this week. She has not had covid and had the booster back in October. All relevant antibodies tested below threshold levels for any protection.

Not good.

John

[pje16]

How was that test done?
My monthly blood test results have changed from negative to possible after a cold, so while they show postive is that protection against covid
There is more to protection than postive blood antibodies

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/ ... ed-to-know

[Julian]

Mrs RS decided to check the state of her antibodies this week. She has not had covid and had the booster back in October. All relevant antibodies tested below threshold levels for any protection.

Not good.

John

I think this is just a fact of life with this virus and with our current vaccine technology we aren't currently able to confer any longer lasting antibody response than that conferred by natural infection. Unless something changes then I think we are all going to have to accept that while the virus is still circulating strongly in the population many of us will get infected multiple times. One hopes however that our B and T cell memory will remain strong such that about 3 days after infection newly produced antibodies will come charging into battle plus T cell responses against cells already infected and will swiftly put an end to the infection, in some cases without the person even knowing they had been infected.

One interesting option for the vulnerable that I have seen discussed quite a lot in the USA but that I haven't seen much mention of over here in the UK (which is a bit odd since it's an AstraZeneca drug) is Evusheld. It is a pre-exposure prophylactic aka a pre-emptive monoclonal antibody treatment that is given as two injections one immediately after the other and is said to confer strong protection from symptomatic disease for at least 6 months after those injections. Since it is a combination of 2 mabs it must I assume be doing that by maintaining high humoral antibody levels over that time period. As I understand all this stuff that's important for people who might not be able to mount a decent (or any) cellular adaptive immune response so one really wants to try and neutralise the virus at the earliest possible stage before it starts infecting cells and replicating. For those of us with good adaptive immune responses it's not likely to be catastrophic to wait that approx 3 days for the adaptive immune response to kick in but for the severely immunocompromised it's a whole different story because those reinforcements aren't going to be arriving in 3-ish days time.

AZ info on Evusheld here - https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centr ... id-19.html

- Julian

[redsturgeon]

How was that test done?
My monthly blood test results have changed from negative to possible after a cold, so while they show postive is that protection against covid
There is more to protection than postive blood antibodies

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/ ... ed-to-know

https://www.attomarker.com/for-clinicians

Similar to this one.

John

[pje16]

So a blood sample then, presumably similar to my one
PS just seen the cost of attomarker (WOW!)

[stevensfo]

Mrs RS decided to check the state of her antibodies this week. She has not had covid and had the booster back in October. All relevant antibodies tested below threshold levels for any protection.

Not good.

John

It's a long time since I studied Biology at uni, but as I remember, antibodies are only produced in response to an infection. If the infection has occurred before, memory cells then recognise the antigen and start producing the antibodies.

To have antibodies circulating all the time without a good reason would be a complete waste of resources, and I imagine that evolution has solved that problem.

The big question is how to increase the memory effect of the vaccines. I imagine that one way would be to use whole denatured virus rather than just part of the protein spikes. No doubt, some labs are already doing this.

Steve

[pje16]

I like your post Steve
woukd you have any idea how antibodies were produced as a result of vaccination
as I understand it (with no medical background at all) the jab was not an infection

[9873210]

The big question is how to increase the memory effect of the vaccines. I imagine that one way would be to use whole denatured virus rather than just part of the protein spikes. No doubt, some labs are already doing this.

Steve

Sinopharm BIBP, Sinopharm WIBP, CoronaVac, Covaxin, CoviVac, VLA2001, QazCovid-in, Minhai, COVIran Barekat, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences COVID-19 vaccine, FAKHRAVAC, and Turkovac are all inactivated virus vaccines for COVID-19.

They have all been through at least some clinical trials and other tests. Most of them have been authorized for use somewhere and several of them have been deployed at scale. There is no evidence that any of them are more effective than spike protein vaccines. The preponderance of evidence is that they do not work as well.

[Julian]

Mrs RS decided to check the state of her antibodies this week. She has not had covid and had the booster back in October. All relevant antibodies tested below threshold levels for any protection.

Not good.

John

It's a long time since I studied Biology at uni, but as I remember, antibodies are only produced in response to an infection. If the infection has occurred before, memory cells then recognise the antigen and start producing the antibodies.
...

I'm not an expert but have been watching an awful lot of presentations, blogs and interviews from some very heavyweight experts and I'm close to 100% confident from what I have understood that what you say is not correct. I'll see if I can track down the refences later, they'll be time indexes into 1 or 2 hour long videos so I don't guarantee that I can find them and one I watched well over a year ago, but essentially my comment is prompted by a couple of videos I saw.

The first relevant video I watched was a presentation from Prof Shane Crotty from the La Jolla Institute in USA. I think it's fair to say that he's one of the world experts in immune memory with a lot of specific work done specifically on SARS-CoV2 during the pandemic (much in collaboration with Prof Alessandro Sette from the same institute). He explained in a guest slot on a MedCram video how the body does a "cost-benefit"(*) analysis on every pathogen it encounters to determine the body's post-recovery reaction. Maintaining a high level of an antibody or antibodies against a particular pathogen(**) after it has first been encountered, potentially for the many decades of remaining life, can take a lot of calories to do so the body uses various factors including perceived threat and frequency of encounter to in some way determine what level of antibody against that particular pathogen(**) should be kept in constant circulation as an appropriate response to a potential next encounter with the pathogen. (I would love to know more about that since I am fascinated about how the body makes those determinations. I suspect it is an area that is still little understood and what there is would probably be far too complex for me to understand armed only with my A-level chemistry.)

In a much later video from only a few months ago another immunologist, a guest speaker from the US National Institute of Health who appeared on an episode of the TWIV (This Week in Virology) podcast, went through some fascinating data on the number and range of antibodies typically circulating in someone's blood. I will try and find that because I would like to remind myself of the actual numbers but there are a huge number (hundreds of millions, maybe even billions) of antibodies constantly in circulation. What was particularly interesting was the range of different antibodies in circulation. The diversity of the antibodies in constant circulation contracts significantly with age and the guest did give numbers but the effect was dramatic. I will try to find that.

The end result is that at any given time we all have a cocktail of antibodies in our blood that were previously developed by the adaptive immune system as the result of an earlier encounter with what would at that time have been a novel (to the individual's immune system) pathogen. When the pathogen is encountered again the specific circulating antibodies in that cocktail that are specific to the pathogen will mount an almost immediate response but since the body has minimised its calorific expenditure it is very possible that the antibody levels are not high enough to confer sterilising immunity, i.e. neutralise all of the pathogen before it can cause infection, so then there is then that 3 day or so wait for the pathogen-specific memory B cells to be activated and for the process of producing more of the pathogen-specific antibodies to be produced.

As another datapoint circulating antibodies are a huge factor in a new-born baby surviving its first few months of life. A new born baby has the mechanisms of an adaptive immune response, memory B and T cells, but they are all naive because it has never encountered any pathogens yet. In the early months however it does have some adaptive immune response it can use at the earliest stage of an infection because it does have circulating antibodies that came across the placental barrier from the mother. Essentially the new born is benefiting from the memory the mother has of pathogens encountered during her life as represented by her cocktail of antibodies constantly circulating in her blood.

- Julian

(*) "cost benefit" in quotes as an acknowledgment that the term might be considered to be anthropomorphising an aspect of the immune response where clearly there is no thought involved, it's all chemical processes. "Cost benefit analysis" was the term that Crotty used in his presentation though so I use it here too despite its potential for misinterpretation.

(**) I suspect I should be saying antigen rather than pathogen here since clearly antibodies are actually specific to antigens of the pathogen and thus I suspect that there "cost benefit" analyses are happening at the antigen level.

[servodude]

I'm not an expert

...aye right!

Where else am I going to find a precis and references with a rational and balanced presentation on what is a pretty complicated nuanced and detailed subject at this time of day... in such short order?

Just because you're not billing us doesn't make your experience or expertise or understanding less expert

now.. piss off and stop making the rest of us look lazy

peace
- sd

[Julian]

I'm not an expert

...aye right!

Where else am I going to find a precis and references with a rational and balanced presentation on what is a pretty complicated nuanced and detailed subject at this time of day... in such short order?

Just because you're not billing us doesn't make your experience or expertise or understanding less expert

now.. piss off and stop making the rest of us look lazy

peace
- sd

Definitely no expertise and the danger there is that without the foundations and subsequent supporting levels of knowledge that are so carefully built up when someone studies at degree level there is always the danger that I have completely misunderstood something but I figure that as long as I do state those disclaimers maybe describing my understanding might at least give people a head start, or a frame of refence if they want to explore further, and if there is anything clearly and blatantly wrong there are people here who have had formal life sciences training who would at least correct gross errors.

Anyway, I did track down at least one of the references I mentioned at time index 26:30 through to approximately time index 31:00 on this video [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW_JOhHPPQU ]. The key bit is the statement that every animal has about 10-15 mg per ml of antibody in its blood and that it doesn't go much higher or much lower than that at least in mammals. The guest speaker then goes on to mention how antibodies are being replaced on a daily basis because we are constantly shedding antibodies e.g. in faeces and saliva and those antibodies are being replaced on a daily basis.

I like your post Steve
woukd you have any idea how antibodies were produced as a result of vaccination
as I understand it (with no medical background at all) the jab was not an infection

That same video also very explicitly answers your question about how the antibodies are produced as a result of vaccination although the explanation is a bit technical. I remember when I started watching these videos I spent at least as much time with videos paused while I had almost constant "I need to look up what on earth that means" moments before I could get any further.

I suppose the simplified version would be that the thing that kicks off the complex chain of events ultimately leading to antibody production is the immune system seeing a protein that isn't supposed to be there in this case because it is a protein from SARS-CoV2 as opposed to "self" proteins which are the ones that are supposed to be in the body. The vaccines we use in the UK, the Pfizer/Moderna mRNA vaccines and AZ viral vector vaccine, all work by getting into cells in the person being vaccinated and causing those cells to produce proteins that aren't native to the body (non-self proteins). In the case of a real SARS-CoV2 infection it will actually cause 29 non-self proteins to be created in an infected cell but in the case of the Covid-19 vaccines it is only causing 1 of those 29 proteins, the SARS-CoV2 spike protein, to be created. That is however still enough for the immune system to recognise and react to that one non-self protein and trigger the desired adaptive immune response. And because the vaccines are only encoding 1 of the SARS-CoV2 proteins and do not encode the other 28 there are insufficient building blocks and enabler proteins for any actual SARS-CoV2 viral particles to be created which otherwise would then go and infect other cells and cause a cascade growth effect, i.e. a genuine infection.

I will now go and "piss off" as instructed by servodude and go and enjoy some fleeting London sunshine.

- Julian