What does this mean? A better vaccine?
A vaccine causes the patient to develop specific immunity (fast reaction to a specific antigen) by introducing (usually injecting) a large amount of an antigen. That prompts the immune system to react by developing B-cells that produce their own antibodies to the antigen. It turns the body into its own antibody factory to deal with whatever you injected, but that takes time.
Injecting antibodies, as in this study, bypasses the natural (slow) specific immunity generation process. Antibodies are created some other way (in a lab, or in some other animal) and then directly injected. It's done for serious diseases or dangerous toxins or immuno-compromised individuals, when waiting for the patient to develop their own specific immunity is too slow or dangerous.
Critically, a vaccine allows the body to maintain the ability to fight off similar-enough infections for a while, but usually takes weeks or more to reach near full effect, sometimes requiring multiple shots for better effectiveness. If you're trying to treat an infection you think you might already have or will get in the next few days, vaccines only work if the progression of the disease is very slow, as in rabies which takes something like 1-2 months to make it into the CNS.
Injecting antibodies is a one-shot treatment that must be repeated until the virus (or toxin or other bad thing) is gone. It's commonly done for toxins (spider or snake venoms), or sometimes for severe diseases (ebola, tetanus), but sars-cov-2 has so much attention that now they're doing it for that too. In patients who aren't immunocompromised, antibody treatments for less-lethal infections give their immune systems more time to generate their own antibodies without developing severe symptoms.
The similarity in the two approaches is that they both ultimately involve antibodies binding to coronavirus proteins. The difference is in where those antibodies come from, and whether the body can produce more at will (vaccine --[time]--> natural immunity), or whether you have to keep injecting them (antibody treatments).
That's only a rough approximation. The immune system is very complicated. Wikipedia, or a book on molecular biology or immunology, will go into a lot more detail.
I'd say it's worth exploring on those grounds alone. Anything to keep health and vital service staff functional during the bad times.
Getting treated with antibodies don't mean you're asymptomatic or that you'll feel well. It only means you'll have less severe symptoms. You'd have healthcare workers walking around sick, spreading the very disease they're trying to treat others for. Or taking up a hospital or clinic bed, not treating patients, using up limited healthcare resources — which, for the duration of their illness, is a worse outcome for their patients than if the healthcare workers weren't there at all.
It's expensive. There's no economy of scale for an unusual disease outbreak. That applies to both antibody and vaccine stockpiles.
If the disease is minor (like COVID-19 usually is for otherwise healthy individuals), healthcare workers might be willing to take a chance to avoid the hassle of PPE, but would their employer (such as a hospital, or MSF)? They're the ones who have to pay for antibody treatment if their healthcare employees get sick. They're the ones who have medical ethicists looking out for both the well-being of the frontline healthcare workers and patients.
If the disease has a significant mortality rate, availability of a specific antibody treatment, even if it's stocked and instantly available, wouldn't motivate anyone to go without PPE. Nor would getting vaccinated. They're not guarantees of survival, and preventing healthcare workers from getting sick is more important than treating patients.
Agreed. If you don't have respiratory, skin, or sensory-processing issues that make it a big deal, it's not a big deal.
Given the "breaking the skin" comment, I wonder if PP is thinking of clear plastic face shields which protect against spatter, but not aerosols.
New mutations (since some chronic, immunocompromised unable to clean the infection patient will get it).
Probably eventually, yeah. Assuming all goes well with further research and development.
"In conclusion, NTD-RBD bsAbs offer promising potential for the design of resilient, next-generation antibody therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 VOCs."