Blood of recovered Covid-19 patients is becoming a hot commodity
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'm not sure I understand this: if you are looking at recovered patients, the number can only grow, albeit slower if there are less new cases? Or do the patients have to be very recently recovered? Is the issue with the antibody concentration related to the severity of the disease or to the time since recovery? If the antibody concentration falls so sharply after recovery, that doesn't sound good for long term immunity...
Antibodies 50% gone by six months, 75% by a year.
Also highly seasonal, for what it's worth. Only 10 patients, all in the Netherlands, but a long study period.
"They found that people frequently got reinfected with the same coronavirus, even in the same year, and sometimes more than once. Over a year and a half, a dozen of the volunteers tested positive two or three times for the same virus, in one case with just four weeks between positive results."
This means the disease will be much less contagious, and join the corpus of all other viruses out there that can cause serious disease, but it will be rare. For most people it will just be another variant of the common cold.
The vaccine will also be included in the annual vaccine cocktail for the elderly. So they will be immune. Since elderly account for 90%+ of deaths the disease will then be much less scary with <0.01% mortality (which is higher than say, driving a car to work).
However, if you get antibodies from somebody who had COVID-19, then it does not confer you immunity. Those antibodies do not give your body a memory effect that allows your body, on its own, to respond to the infection as a preventative measure for COVID-19.
What it does though, for people who are actively infected with COVID-19, is reduce the severity of the infection. The influx of antibodies are believed to "neutralize" the COVID-19 virus already present in the body, by binding to the virus itself.
Encouragingly, there seems to be a degree of cross-immunity between HCOV’s. This paper touches on the possible implications: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6493/860
The vaccine will be interesting to see. There's a fair chance it will confer some immunity, but that those infected will may get a little sick.
https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2020/05/how-oregons-s...
[1] the article doesn't specify, but presumably a PCR test
Also other EU countries have done number of studies but results are often published in their own language only.
If you’re asking if they specifically test plasma for COVID-19 antibodies and scalp it to brokers, my guess is “probably not”. My blood bank has documentation about the disease tests they do, and they say nothing about testing for COVID-19 in particular.
This especially applies for plasma donations, even though plasma donors (often poor people, and predominantly in the US) are paid for their donations (although a meager amount considering what is involved along with the side effects of plasmapheresis). Basically the US effectively supplies the majority of blood products for the world, and plasma is a precious human resource. The US also has extremely lax rules on plasma donation.
There have been scandals relatively recently around paid plasma, where Mexican nationals on visitor visas cross the border 2-3 times a week to do this. The donations can in some cases be enough income to get by in Mexico (or so I heard, but probably not well). This is important due to cartel violence, as it is considered to be "safer".
However, watch the video on this page which details the scandal: https://www.propublica.org/article/pharmaceutical-companies-...
The 2 main people in this video, Mexican nationals, ended up having severe health effects from the frequent (and legal) plasma donation route. In fact, the female in the video literally had a secondary immune deficiency from donating plasma so much, and if she continues (she was advised not to, by a Mexican doctor) she definitely can end up with a primary immune deficiency and other severe health problems.
Sure, plasma donations are necessary (I require a blood product due to a rare neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system) but it is some really sad stuff, too.
> If you’re asking if they specifically test plasma for COVID-19 antibodies and scalp it to brokers
Sometimes these plasma companies do test regular donors for certain (often rare) antibodies, such as for whatever shot that is given to Rh negative mothers who are pregnant with a child that could be Rh positive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_(blood_donor)
This guy is in Wikipedia for being a blood donor. He's estimated to have saved 2.4 million lives.
I know factually that many people are paid for plasma, and that there’s a reason for it, but I’ve never been, and the concept feels very strange to me.
The American Red Cross says plasma can be donated every 28 days, and my local blood bank follows this guideline. Donating twice a week is insane. Plasmapheresis is safe. Undergoing any procedure 10 times more frequently than recommended by doctors is a recipe for trouble.
Generally blood products derived from plasma cost about double for the exact same quantity in the US, compared to other developed countries with universal healthcare (excluding Switzerland). For example, the going rate for the blood product I take, in the developed world, is 40 Euro per gram (roughly $50/gram). My US health insurance pays out (not what is being billed by the provider--which is way, way more), under contract, $100/gram for the blood product. I take around a couple hundred to a few hundred grams per month. So, yes, even that alone is scandalous.
Some of those companies believe that they will have a hyper-immune (A shot that is given to somebody that is COVID-19 positive, to help them recover. It is literally pooled COVID-19 antibodies from several donors, so antibody levels are as not as big of a deal compared to getting an "infusion" of convalescent plasma from a single donor. But antibody levels still do matter!) COVID-19 product to use by July, although it will still need to go through clinical trials. We are literally one of the few countries in the world equipped to do this and scale it, due to our plasma donation infrastructure (however, it exploits the poor, and that is tragic).
As somebody who takes a plasma product containing antibodies from thousands of donors (subcutaneous immunoglobulin) due to a rare chronic health condition , I would be surprised if the hyperimmune COVID-19 product was found NOT to be effective.
Would what you wrote apply to a lesser degree for whole blood or red blood cell donations?
I'm sure they make a profit on any type of blood donations but as it's ostensibly a non-profit I would assume most of it gets funneled back into funding other Red Cross services, but now I'm actually curious.
How Blood-Plasma Companies Target the Poorest Americans: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/plasma-...
The plasma companies have experienced their share of scandals too: https://web.archive.org/web/20170401035608/http://taintedblo...
In more recent times: https://www.propublica.org/article/pharmaceutical-companies-...
The question is equivalent to "if you give blood, doesn't that mean you have less blood for yourself?" and the answer is "yes, for a little while".
I can imagine that there would be a huge market for large quantities of donated blood from recovered patients for transfusion purposes, so I would expect to see several business sprout up in short order to exploit this market.