A New Antibody-Dependent Enhancement Hypothesis

blogs.sciencemag.org

15 points·raphlinus··5 comments

The original paper was discussed here a few days ago, with a fair amount of commentary before it was (rightfully) flagged[1]. A lot of the discussion was speculation, and this blog post (by the excellent Derek Lowe) puts it in useful perspective.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168789

Antibody-dependent enhancement seems to be the latest hot trend among pseudoscientific anti-vaxxers, but they all conveniently ignore the fact that we literally have evidence that this doesn’t happen in humans. Even the study authors admit that the effect wasn’t seen in their animal trials nor in human trials:

> And the authors note that if antibody treatment led to ADE in humans, then it would have been seen in the convalescent serum trials and in its clinical usage. But it was not

You "literally have evidence" that what doesn't happen in humans, ADE in general? Seems pretty easy to disprove; there's a lot of research based on the phenomenon, eg:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211844/

If you're talking about ADE with COVID specifically, I agree there's no evidence, but there's the obvious principle that absence of evidence doesn't equate to "evidence this doesn't happen", which, if you have it, please link?

Side-note: definitely helps your argument to throw around the term "anti-vaxxers", though. You could probably just remove all the other words in your comment and keep just that, to the same dog-whistling effect?

> literally have evidence that this doesn’t happen in humans

Do you have some source for this?

Given how the pandemic has been going I would give this at least four to six months before any conclusive facts are put down.

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