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Comment by snapetom | Hacker News Reader

ADE has me worried the most. There's some circumstantial evidence that COVID-19 might use ADE. The arguments against it (from claimed medical experts) on reddit was basically "ADE is extremely rare."

If the evidence for/against something is based solely on percentages, you'll get a raised eyebrow from me.

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In medicine and biology, evidence IS based on percentages. That's why all these papers that present possible mechanisms with no numbers to back them up are confusing people. You need thousands to hundreds of thousands of datapoints. This is not an exact engineering discipline (yet..) unfortunately.

A minor counterpoint from a clinical researcher: in medicine and biology, evidence is mostly based on bullshit, not percentages.

I thought the the argument against it is that survivors develop antibodies that neutralize the virus in vitro.

There's enough anecdotal evidence of re-infection that suggest otherwise, although there a wide variety of reasons for that -bad tests, they were never fully recovered in the first place, etc.

SARS is believed to use ADE, and COVID-19 is closely related to SARS.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3019510/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25073113

On the good news-ish side, a MERS vaccine entered into Phase 2 trials at Walter Reed late last year, although I can't find anything about that more recently. MERS is another coronavirus, but doesn't use ADE.

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