Better in their words…

I really didn’t want to do a COVID post today, but duty calls, as I stumbled upon a new study from Singapore released a few weeks ago. Not so long ago, I explained that evidence now shows excessive Spike protein exposure from a combination of vaccines and breakthrough infections leads to immune tolerance: The immune system begins to send anti-inflammatory IgG4 antibodies after the Spike protein, that basically serve as a tag that tells your immune system not to worry about the protein.

For every thousand teams that shoots up a bunch of people and proudly announces “boosters lead to superior antibody levels versus natural infections!”, there’s one team where someone has two braincells to rub together and decides to take a good look at WHAT SORT OF ANTIBODIES the body is actually deploying. And whenever they bother to do that and I read the results, I feel like starting an unhealthy drinking habit.

You should never trust the man of one study, so today I have to point out another study recently released, that simply shows the same thing: The immune system is beginning to tolerate SARS-COV-2 spike proteins in people who received the vaccines.

Have a look at the following image, it shows you everything you need to know:

These are mild infections I circled here in red, in unvaccinated versus the vaccinated.

What you see here is clear evidence of long-term tolerance in a subset of mild breakthrough infections, which is not showing up in mild unvaccinated infections.

But the signal also shows up a few weeks after the infection, shown here:

So we see the signature of tolerance, with IgG ratios in a subset of mild breakthrough infections that are worse than both mild and moderate infections. And if you had any doubt whether it’s good to deploy an IgG4 antibody response to Spike, you can just compare mild to moderate infections and it’s clear that this is not how the body is supposed to respond.

In fact, if you had any doubt left, do me a favor and go out and look for other respiratory infections where the body switches over time from IgG1 and 3 to IgG4. I don’t know of any. As far as I know, it’s not normal.

For what it’s worth, these are Delta breakthrough infections, so this is from the pre-booster era. In other words, skipping the booster won’t be sufficient to skip out on a tolerance response. Just like in the previous study we looked at, the first two shots are sufficient to eventually start deploying IgG4 against Spike, a response you don’t see in the unvaccinated.

Note by the way that the majority of mild breakthrough infections show some evidence of beginning tolerance: By 180 days, there is exactly ONE out of 36 mild unvaccinated naturally immune people, who shows a more IgG4 shifted response THAN THE MAJORITY OF MILD BREAKTHROUGH INFECTIONS. When you start to get some substantial amount of IgG4 it starts to cause positive feedback effects, that then end up leading to IgG4 becoming more dominant. I don’t know where the exact threshold lies, but that’s what the literature says.

What you don’t see here of course, is the IgM to IgG ratio. The effect is even worse, if you would take into consideration that the vaccines shift the whole response from IgM to IgG, particularly the Adenovirus vector vaccines. In fact, the fact that IgG is made to do the job of dealing with this virus on its own without the help of IgM may be playing a role in pushing the IgG’s towards tolerance.

If you enjoy a metaphor, then basically one group is sending mostly police officers into a warzone with orders to defuse tensions whereas the other group is sending mostly soldiers with orders to kill. And then in addition to this, we’re ignoring the fact that the latter group also sends a bunch of tanks along, because it’s too much of a hassle to count those.

If this was some sort of booster specific issue it would be bad enough. But two shots are enough to eventually push people towards this response. And maybe you can come up with a perfectly valid argument why people should be deploying antibodies against a Sarbecovirus that their body would normally use to tolerate peanut protein, or to learn to tolerate pollen from plants when we place the pollen under people’s tongue to reduce their allergy, among other fun stuff.

Maybe you can come up with some sort of explanation where this response makes perfect sense. But I can’t find it and trust me, I’ve looked.