Why is COVID-19 serious for some?

Do the antibodies we make to fight COVID-19 infection cause serious illness?

A new paper – so new in fact that it has yet to be peer-reviewed – by scientists in Hangzhou, China, seems to indicate exactly that.

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

It’s hard to think of antibodies – one of the body’s best infection fighters – as “pathogenic,” but that’s exactly what happens in autoimmune diseases. Instead, the antibodies that the body develops in response to foreign invaders attach themselves to body tissue, sometimes causing catastrophic damage.

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

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

The fact that the antibodies that target the COVID-19 spike protein are harmful is quite disturbing, but it is particularly disturbing to know that these same antibodies are likely to be triggered by COVID-19 vaccines as well as by the virus.

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

Advanced protein antibodies attack body tissue

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

As the researchers expected, two of the antibodies bound strongly to damaged lung cells, and one of those also bound strongly to healthy cells.

The researchers then injected the antibodies, along with certain combinations, into the bodies of healthy pregnant mice at three-day intervals. They wanted to see what damage, if any, the antibodies would do to the mice and their puppies.

Again, as expected, the same two antibodies that had bound well to human lung cells caused significant tissue damage in the little mice.

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

“This is a very disturbing finding,” says Zoey O’Toole, a vaccine safety advocate who has a background in physics and engineering and who has carefully reviewed the study. “This should give everyone pause, 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 those who have died as well as in others who develop symptoms to long term.

Most viruses cause short-term illness that resolves after the body has had time to develop antibodies, which appears to be the case for the majority of people who contract COVID-19.

Why then do some people die after two to three weeks of illness, when their immune system has already cleared the virus from their body?

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

We know that no two people have identical immune responses. With COVID-19, we have also seen that those who become seriously ill have higher levels of inflammatory cytokines in their blood. It is the “cytokine storm” the media have clung to to explain serious infectious disease.

How antibodies create serious illness

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

A Nature article in January noted that surprisingly high percentages of people with severe illness from COVID-19 had autoimmune antibodies. These antibodies targeted 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 deregulation, and sometimes increasing the activity of the virus itself.

Chinese researchers aren’t suggesting how antibodies damage tissue, but autoimmunity researchers have long understood that the particular proteins our antibodies attach to when they target a virus are sometimes found in our own cells.

This “molecular mimicry” may only be a partial match, but even that may be enough for otherwise useful antibodies to attack our own healthy cells.

COVID-19 vaccine design

The results of this pre-print have profound implications for vaccine design. In order for a vaccine to be as safe and effective as possible, it would need to stimulate antibodies that neutralize the pathogen but do not bind to any body tissue, so that people who have received it are at risk. immune to autoimmune effects.

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

The spike protein that makes SARS-CoV-2 so infectious to humans was the target vaccine makers focused on when designing their vaccines. They believed the spike protein itself, aside from the rest of the virus, was harmless. If the isolated protein was not the pathogen, it would be safe to cause the body to produce the protein for a short time.

But, as new Chinese research points out, this approach can pose at least three problems.

Potential problems with advanced COVID-19 protein vaccines

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

“If you suppress the virus’s replication capabilities, it still has a major damaging effect on vascular cells,” Dr. Uri Manor, study co-author and researcher at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., Said stated in an interview for Salk.edu.

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

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

Finally, data from the Hangzhou researchers suggests that the only thing that might prevent the harmful effects of pathogenic antibodies is that there are also non-pathogenic antibodies alongside them, doing their job normally. But whether vaccines as formulated can actually trigger the production of healthy, non-pathogenic antibodies remains an open question.

“This study suggests that antibodies directed against other parts of the virus may counteract potential damage from anti-peak antibodies,” says O’Toole. “This is an important discovery. But there is no virus in mRNA vaccines. It is therefore very unlikely that these vaccines could produce enough beneficial antibodies to help. “

The result

As we learn more about the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to harm humans, a growing body of evidence suggests that vaccines can cause harm as well.

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

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