I’m on mobile so won’t give this comment the substance it should, but I want to nip this ridiculous notion in the bud.
The key concept here is immunological memory. Maintaining antibodies for years for non-severe diseases (how SARS-2 presents for the vast majority of people) is not a good thing.
Rather, there are memory b cells, memory t cells, and other forms of immunological memory. These cells lie dormant and when exposed tk the antigens corresponding to the previously fought-off pathogen (SARS-CoV-2 in this place) they “activate” and start cranking out antibodies exponentially. In other words, after you no longer have any active circulating antibodies, you still have these memory cells that persist for DECADES.
TL;DR: it is not a problem that antibodies only last a few months. That is how the vast majority of diseases work. It would only be a problem if we had evidence that there was no immunological memory to SARS-2, but on the contrary we have tons of evidence of that, even if it’s not fully characterized
Please don’t fall for this narrative that has went around for months. I truly believe that there is a faction of irrational doom-sayers who are collectively losing their shit over this in a way that they would never do for other serious diseases like Influenza. I won’t speculate on their motivations for doing so, I have a few theories but I truly do not know why there is so much of this craziness going around.
Sorry for the lack of citations but immunological memory is a robust and well-studied phenomenon and I encourage anyone concerned about COVID-19 to read some papers about it in a general sense
There's another study in Nature that shows that there are barely-detectable antibodies which have a very potent neutralizing activity (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2456-9). Key passage from the abstract:
> Thus, most convalescent plasmas obtained from individuals who recover from COVID-19 do not contain high levels of neutralizing activity. Nevertheless, rare but recurring RBD-specific antibodies with potent antiviral activity were found in all individuals tested, suggesting that a vaccine designed to elicit such antibodies could be broadly effective.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] threadThe key concept here is immunological memory. Maintaining antibodies for years for non-severe diseases (how SARS-2 presents for the vast majority of people) is not a good thing.
Rather, there are memory b cells, memory t cells, and other forms of immunological memory. These cells lie dormant and when exposed tk the antigens corresponding to the previously fought-off pathogen (SARS-CoV-2 in this place) they “activate” and start cranking out antibodies exponentially. In other words, after you no longer have any active circulating antibodies, you still have these memory cells that persist for DECADES.
TL;DR: it is not a problem that antibodies only last a few months. That is how the vast majority of diseases work. It would only be a problem if we had evidence that there was no immunological memory to SARS-2, but on the contrary we have tons of evidence of that, even if it’s not fully characterized
Please don’t fall for this narrative that has went around for months. I truly believe that there is a faction of irrational doom-sayers who are collectively losing their shit over this in a way that they would never do for other serious diseases like Influenza. I won’t speculate on their motivations for doing so, I have a few theories but I truly do not know why there is so much of this craziness going around.
Sorry for the lack of citations but immunological memory is a robust and well-studied phenomenon and I encourage anyone concerned about COVID-19 to read some papers about it in a general sense
> Thus, most convalescent plasmas obtained from individuals who recover from COVID-19 do not contain high levels of neutralizing activity. Nevertheless, rare but recurring RBD-specific antibodies with potent antiviral activity were found in all individuals tested, suggesting that a vaccine designed to elicit such antibodies could be broadly effective.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hbzm1d/antibodies_...