Scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2
bmj.com
bmj.com
> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken
Lots of people experienced stuff like “getting chickenpox and then gaining immunity,” so the idea that not getting any illnesses for a couple years during lockdown would result in us being resistant to fewer illnesses seems not at all preposterous.
Apparently general infection rates are still high, so it didn’t bear out. But preposterous? Not really…
Using chickenpox as an example of people's common knowledge of immunity is inadvertently very funny here.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-medical-critical-...
The fact that it conceptually makes sense to a layperson is irrelevant in a truth-seeking context. Much for the same reason that a theory that Google functions by paid human labors manually assigning results to search queries they predict you will search ahead of time "making sense" to a layperson is meaningless in discovering how the system actually works.
> In general because your immune system has a finite memory for diseases and because
SARS-CoV-2 is linked to “an unusually high level of ‘indiscriminate’ killing of T cells,”6 says Leitner, adding that this observation is “reminiscent of” measles, which can cause immune amnesia by depleting memory B cells (a different type of immune cell), leaving people vulnerable to pathogens they were previously immune to.
Brazilian researchers found that covid-19 triggered a sharp rise in T cell exhaustion and cellular ageing.10 Although the comparator group was limited, the strongest effects were seen in CD8+ T cells, which suppress latent viruses such as EBV and VZV. These effects were seen even after mild infections.
> diseases tend to mutate faster when infecting larger number of people
> its more like the latter.
> Immunity debt refers to a theoretical concept that describes a potential decline in immune system function following a period of reduced exposure to infectious diseases.
Is this the same concept you're referring to? I would hardly call that a proposterous hypothesis at face value. It's reminiscent of the generally-accepted "hygiene hypothesis", that lack of early childhood exposure to some germs causes poor immune response or even asthma later in life.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/consumers-biolo...
This page seems focused on RSV in particular, noting that in that specific case RSV seems to not have the beneficial effect of exposure to some other thing, yet still says it may have "seemed obvious" that it should have.
> The “hygiene hypothesis” is supported by epidemiologic studies demonstrating that allergic diseases and asthma are more likely to occur when the incidence and levels of endotoxin (bacterial lipopolysaccharide, or LPS) in the home are low. LPS is a bacterial molecule that stimulates and educates the immune system by triggering signals through a molecular “switch” called TLR4, which is found on certain immune system cells.
...
> It may seem obvious that, since both the RSV F protein and LPS signal through the same TLR4 “switch,” they both would educate the infant’s immune system in the same beneficial way. But that may not be the case.
Anecdotally, I played a lot more in the dirt as a young child than any of my children, and I had much more severe asthma and allergies than they have, including the one that contracted RSV as a two-week old infant and went on to get sick just as often as their two siblings.
If you're conversing with a conservative, you will often get a kneejerk block – clearly an immune response from an LLM disputing their beliefs over and over again.
It's a symbiotic combination of that plus capital interests driving a narrative to achieve a desired outcome for our archaic consumption-based economy.
Both parties of capital have lots of blood on their hands, but according to them, they're "just doing what the people wanted."
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
There's clearly a long-term aftermath, but it's not well understood. There are other diseases where that occurs, despite the initial infection seeming to be over. Chickenpox as a child can turn into shingles as an adult.[1] The virus is never completely cleared.
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-shingles-if-y...
There's absolutely no reason to believe that SARS-CoV2 has similar capability, and those who cling to this hypothesis are engaging in pseudoscience. Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.
You might think that, but in the past two decades theres been so many "how did we miss that?" in so many fields. I'll let field experts bring specifics up- I only know popularized examples like Roman Concrete. And the ever-easy Mars unit-conversion error.
Which has so many examples it's almost a truism.
Shouldn't we just look for the ring that we learned how to detect herpes in nerves? Because every virus has to be constructed exactly like herpes in order to infect nerve cells, apparently.
Finding Covid viral fragments in people long after the infection is very concerning, we don't know how its staying in the body or where but it seems likely its persisting.
Several variants of Malaria can be The Gift That Keeps On Giving: https://www.mmv.org/malaria/symptoms-and-treatments/relapsin...
However, from the article, it seems that they believe that COVID just whacks the immune system, in general, so everyone gets to belly up to the bar.
Look at the content of the article. Literally every quote in this piece is some scientist speculating. That's completely fine, and what scientists do, but the "journalist" is spinning it into a narrative of "scientists believe X", which is both true (some scientists can be found to support literally any claim), and misleadingly over-confident.
[1] https://asm.org/articles/2019/may/measles-and-immune-amnesia
[1] https://asm.org/articles/2019/may/measles-and-immune-amnesia
If I understand Vox's definition of the term[0] correctly, this should be very easy to confirm or debunk.
Why it isn't been the case yet?
[0]: "A central premise of immunity debt is that for many infectious diseases, repeat infections are milder than the first infection."
This is also the fundamental, well understood, mechanism of vaccines and herd immunity [1]: "Immunological memory" [2]. I think that sentence is very irresponsible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
[2] Immunological memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory
There is no rethinking here from serious science (The BMJ is a really bad journal and one of the ones that supported this garbage), the science on infections has been clear for decades, every infection damages us. Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects. Its not a subtle change, in Long Covid research its become increasingly hard to find controls, many people without symptoms show the same blood based markers of immune dysruption and cognitive slowing.
No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.
In fact, doing what you're doing right now -- trying to present the hypothesis as activism in order to remove it from the realm of reasonable discussion -- is inherently political.
> Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects.
There is no good evidence for this claim. We have robust T- and B-cell mediated immunity to prior Covid infection, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands of papers showing it. Please stop.
The general origin of this meme is the article linked in the piece, which, if you read the abstract you'll see is making a very limited claim about early infection, and cannot be used to support the notion that "Covid damages the immune system" in any long-term sense, particularly when we know the opposite is true from many, many other studies:
https://academic.oup.com/jleukbio/article-abstract/116/6/138...
I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative:
> Ashish Jha, former White House covid-19 response coordinator under President Biden, has publicly rejected this hypothesis. “There’s a lot of bad information out there about how covid-19 damages the immune system. It really doesn’t,” he posted on X in early 2024. More than a year later, his view is unchanged.
I hypothesize the rise in these less common infections is none other than Santa Claus. You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific.....the fact that it's complete made up bullshit that, like the parent says of the "immunity debt" concept, "never had any science behind it.", is what makes it unscientific. That it's made up and was never shown by any evidence.
The flu didn't disappear, and we know very well why it almost disappeared: it is far less contagious than SARS-CoV-2, and masking and the huge dip in international travel stopped it.
>It's a hypothesis
Here in Switzerland (and in France), it hasn't been presented by pediatrics societies as an hypothesis at all, but as a fact and the main argument to reopen immediately. It has also been used again and again to explain the huge waves of infections of many illnesses that surged after the end of lockdowns, and absolutely none of them ever quoted that "immune debt is just an hypothesis", and none of them have suggested any other alternative hypothesis such as "SARS-CoV-2 has a detrimental effect on the immune system or health in general".
Because to admit so would be to admit the mass infection of children had been a massive mistake on their part.
>I don't like to resort to appeal to authority, but the article quotes Ashish Jha (hardly a Covid minimizer) as dismissing the "immune damage" narrative
And Jha has no explanation for the increased, sustained (and now synchronised) waves of infections and illnesses that are plain to see. He has nothing. This is the fiasco of "masks aren't proven to work" again.
they are a creative fiction to help people feel like they have control over their environment, not a substantially evidenced intervention.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/05/02/do-masks-work-rcts-rando...
"Every movement we make damages our muscles" is also a true statement and can be misused by idiots.
"hygiene hypothesis"
EDIT: Actually, I think learned opinion is that it might be our modern lack of intestinal parasites that could be making our immune system paranoid rather than a lack of dirt per se? Or maybe that's just the newer position with no consensus yet.
The article suggests that covid infections cause immunity amnesia similar to other known viruses. This is based on shingles and EBV reactivation incidence being higher in people who had covid.
And yet was claimed again and again by e.g. pediatrics societies in Switzerland and France to justify ending every restrictions (thereby mass contaminating children before they could be vaccinated, and contributing to more spread and more mutations of the virus)
It was a term coined to allow discussion of a reasonable hypothesis that had suddenly become relevant, which was then latched onto by people who found it useful. The causality that you are claiming is backwards.
Something acute is severe by definition, but without the S we'd all be talking about ARS, so they added the Severe
Chronic pins and needles should be checked urgently by a doctor as it's very serious