Why is COVID-19 serious for some?

Are the antibodies we produce to fight COVID-19 infection causing serious illness?

A new paper, in fact so new that it has not yet been peer-reviewed, by scientists in Hangzhou, China, seems to indicate this.

The researchers ’data suggest that at least two antibodies targeting the spike protein that allows COVID-19 virus to enter human cells are“ pathogenic, ”meaning these antibodies create disease on their own.

It’s hard to think that antibodies, one of the body’s best fighters of infection, are “pathogenic,” but that’s exactly what happens in autoimmune diseases. The antibodies that the body develops in response to foreign invaders adhere to body tissues, sometimes causing catastrophic damage.

In early 2020, Japanese researchers found that many deaths from COVID-19 were caused by the body’s immune response. In a peer-reviewed article published in Inflammation and Regeneration, the scientists argued that it was a “cytokine storm” that overwhelmed the body and was implicated in high mortality rates from the virus.

This new Chinese study shows that another component of the immune system can also be a danger.

The fact that antibodies targeting the COVID-19 ear protein are harmful is disturbing enough, but it is especially disturbing to know that these same antibodies are likely to be triggered by COVID-19 vaccines as well as the virus.

The three vaccines approved for emergency use by the CDC stimulate the production of antibodies against ear protein: the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines and the Johnson and Johnson recombinant vector vaccine.

Spike Protein antibodies attack body tissues

Chinese researchers suspected that some antibodies triggered by a pathogenic virus could attack body tissues. To test the hypothesis, they identified seven different COVID-19 antibodies. They then analyzed the degree of connection of each of these antibodies with human lung cells, both healthy and damaged. Antibodies that bind to your tissue cells can cause autoimmune damage.

As the researchers expected, two of the antibodies bind strongly to the damaged lung cells and one of these also binds strongly to the healthy cells.

The researchers injected the antibodies, as well as some combinations, into the bodies of healthy pregnant mice at three-day intervals. They wanted to see what damage the antibodies would cause to mice and their puppies.

Again, as expected, the same two antibodies that had bound well to human lung cells caused significant damage to the tissues of the mouse puppies.

In fact, the antibody that could bind to healthy human lung cells, REGN10987, killed nearly half of the pups.

“This is a very troubling finding,” says Zoey O’Toole, a vaccine safety advocate who has training in physics and engineering and who reviewed the study carefully. “I should take a break from everyone, especially pregnant women.”

How does SARS-CoV-2 kill?

One of the big questions about SARS-CoV-2, also known as COVID-19, is exactly how it causes serious illness in the dead and in others with long-term symptoms.

Most viruses cause short-term illnesses that resolve once the body has had time to develop antibodies, which seems to be the case for most people who contract COVID-19.

So why do some people die after two to three weeks of illness, when their immune system has already removed the virus from their body?

And why do some people (known as “long carriers”) have long-term multi-organ damage that seems to have nothing to do with the virus?

We know that no two people have identical immune responses. With COVID-19, we have also seen that those who get seriously ill have higher levels of inflammatory cytokines in the blood. This is the “cytokine storm” that the media took as an explanation for the serious infectious diseases.

How antibodies create serious diseases

But elevated cytokines are only part of the picture. Researchers have long suspected an autoimmune aspect of severe COVID-19 disease.

An article published in Nature in January noted that surprisingly high percentages of people with severe COVID-19 disease had autoimmune antibodies. These antibodies are aimed at the immune system itself, as well as the blood vessels, heart and brain.

Since COVID-19 was first identified, we have seen autoimmune responses worsening the effect of the disease, increasing inflammation and immune dysregulation, and sometimes increasing the activity of the virus itself.

Chinese researchers do not suggest how antibodies damage tissues, but researchers on autoimmunity have long understood that the particular proteins our antibodies bind to when targeting a virus are sometimes found in our own. cells.

This “molecular mimicry” may be just a partial coincidence, but even that may be enough to cause useful antibodies to attack our own healthy cells.

COVID-19 vaccine design

The results of this prepress have profound implications for vaccine design. For a vaccine to be as safe and effective as possible, it should be one that stimulates antibodies that neutralize the pathogen but do not bind to any body tissue, so people who receive it would be safe from autoimmune effects.

Unfortunately, it appears that industry scientists did not take molecular mimicry into account when designing COVID-19 vaccines.

The ear protein that makes SARS-CoV-2 so infectious to humans was the goal that vaccine manufacturers focused on when designing their vaccines. They believed that the spike protein itself, apart from the rest of the virus, was harmless. If the isolated protein were not the agent of the disease, it would get the body to make it in a short time would be safe.

But, as China’s new research points out, there can be at least three problems with this approach.

Potential problems with COVID-19 Spike protein vaccines

First, the spike protein itself is not harmless, as has been proven since. In fact, according to science published by an international team of researchers in March in the journal Circulation Research, spike protein can damage lung endothelial cells, just like those that bind to antibodies in the Chinese study, as well. such as endothelial cells. which cover the blood vessels throughout the body.

“If you remove the reproductive abilities of the virus, it will still have a significant detrimental effect on vascular cells,” Dr. Uri Manor, co-author of the study and researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. , he said in an interview for Salk.edu.

In the first paragraph of the press release, Salk.edu states in parentheses that the punctured proteins “behave very differently from those safely encoded in vaccines.” However, neither the study itself nor the press release provide evidence to justify this claim. At the same time, we have seen that many adverse effects reported after vaccination, including blood clots and strokes, are vascular events similar to those associated with the disease itself.

Second, as this new research demonstrates, antibodies generated to neutralize spike protein can be particularly toxic to human cells, especially if the cells are already damaged.

Finally, data from Hangzhou researchers suggested that the only thing that could prevent the negative effects of pathogenic antibodies is when there are also non-pathogenic antibodies next to them, which do their job normally. But whether vaccines as formulated can trigger the production of healthy antibodies and healthy pathogens remains an open question.

“This study suggests that antibodies against other parts of the virus may counteract the potential damage of anti-ear antibodies,” O’Toole explains. “It simply came to our notice then. But there is no virus in mRNA vaccines. Therefore, it is very unlikely that these vaccines can produce enough beneficial antibodies to help them. “

The Upshot

As we learn more about the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to harm humans, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that vaccines can also cause harm.

In our rush to find a way to prevent serious COVID-19, we may unintentionally be doing more harm than good. It may be years before the full extent of the damage is known.

What was worse, the disease or its prevention? Only time will tell.