Interview With a Virologist
Excellent interview in the Houston Chronicle with the Texas A&M virologist and coronavirus researcher Ben Neuman
There is an excellent interview in the Houston Chronicle with the Texas A&M virologist and coronavirus researcher Ben Neuman. There's some remarkable detail here from a scientist on the front lines of Covid-19 clinical research.
Much of this will be VERY familiar to anyone following my own work these past few months. Below are direct quotes from Dr. Neuman's interview along with my own commentary in italics.
Here are the key takeaways:
Lack of Vaccine Effectiveness
None of the vaccines gives stronger antibody responses than actually getting the virus, and the response from actually getting the virus seems to wear off in something like three to six months.
This is quite at odds with the vaccines most people are familiar with but quite typical for vaccines targeting upper-respiratory RNA viruses.
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Short-Term Immunity ONLY
"For everybody. On average, the antibodies dropped down faster in people over 65. After three months, something like 30 percent or 40 percent of them are still antibody-positive.
For younger people, something like two-thirds still have some remnant of an immune response after three months.
In any age group, there are going to be some people who are not protected. And there so much virus swirling around at the moment that I don’t like the odds."
10-12 weeks of immunity, 6-months max, is what's been seen repeatedly...this will also be the case with the vaccine.
Re-Infection Period
"And those second infections have been rolling out all over the place. There was a paper from Mexico a couple weeks ago with, like 285 second infections; I believe they had PCR-confirmed all of those, which is crazy.
We’re seeing now average time to reinfection is somewhere around two-and-a-half to three months, which is really not great. So in terms of vaccination, what are we gonna have to protect people who have been sick and have recovered?"
Severity of 2nd Infections
"The immunity window is small. You can’t really tell how small until you get reinfected, and nobody wants that.
We also know that the virus is sometimes worse the second time, and sometimes not as bad. On average, based on the limited data we have so far, the severity is pretty much as severe as the first time.
Understanding this is very interesting for biologists, but there aren’t a lot of obvious ways to change it yet."
(Again, there's no long-term immune memory that can be expected to reduce the severity of future re-infections!)
Lack of T-Cell Immunity
"Six months after they were infected, it turns out that both of the T cells that we see prominently during an infection are gone then, and the T cells that are left are making signals that would absolutely stamp down any attempt to make those useful T cells appear again. They’re driving the immune system in a different direction.
So I don’t know that we can count on a T cell response the second time a person gets infected."
This means there appears to be NO long-term t-cell immunity to SarsCoV2...in fact, the virus appears to block FUTURE t-cell production. So NO HERD IMMUNITY...even with full vaccine compliance
On the Pfizer Vaccine
"Nobody knows exactly what that means. They haven’t released the data."
"There’s no scientific detail here. These are PR-based announcements."
Science by Press Release is NOT science...
On the Russian Vaccine
"This is actually the vaccine for which we have the clearest and most complete set of data — paradoxical as that may seem. They’ve done the most tests, and they’ve done them the best, weirdly enough."
The Russians are actually doing a great job with transparency...much more so than their counterparts in the US
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/COVID-vaccine-update-lisa-gray-ben-neuman-texas-15723972.php
About the author:
I am a scientist with 20+ years in the biotech industry. I currently work as a consultant with companies involved in developing molecular diagnostics platforms, including some of the key testing platforms used to detect the SarsCoV2 virus.
So I bring an insider’s perspective that is scientifically oriented but directed to a general audience trying to make sense of the conflicting stories surrounding the Covid pandemic.
To learn more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalewharrison/
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