Peter wrote:
As the old saying goes: the proof of the pudding is in the eating so how many people here want to do a fly to ski meet-up in the Alps?I would predict the figure to be close to zero.
I don’t want to do one, but because of the Covid-related hysteria and the extra paperwork & hassle it creates, not because of Covid itself.
Silvaire wrote:
how do you recover if you have no measurable antibodies? As an MIT graduate scientist he’s as perplexed by that as anybody.
Obviously not a MIT degree in medicine or biochemistry.
The type of antibodies you create through vaccination is one of many ways how the body copes with infections. It’s actually more the long term memory how a bogey looks like than the short term marine corps. Therefore even if someone can not produce antibodies they can still fight the disease – it’s just not that vaccinations are effective and every time the virus hits the body the immune system again thinks “uuups – something I’ve never seen so far”.
It’s not surprising that your colleague doesn’t develop antibodies. About 20% of vaccinated don’t do. This is exactly the reason why even the most invinceible amongst us need to get vaccinated to protect those who do but do not develop antibodies
He’s not unaware of those details, but the science is ill defined according to his doctors. He remains perplexed that something seemingly so simple wouldn’t be easily quantified or measured.
Hopefully after 100% of the population is vaccinated those “20%” (or 66,000,000 people in the US) won’t run into each other often for the rest of time, eh?
. He remains perplexed that something seemingly so simple wouldn’t be easily quantified or measured.
Cell-mediated immune response that doesn’t involve antibodies is hardly “ill defined science”, unquantifiable or unmeasurable.
I’m sure he already has 
If the question is why you can get your antibody levels tested but not a test to quantify your T-cell response… All I know about it is that T-cells are apparently miserable to work with, and the sort of thing you might measure for research, but not on a routine basis.
Silvaire wrote:
but the science is ill defined according to his doctors.
If his doctor really said this and it is not just storytelling, he should very seriously consider changing his doctor
He remains perplexed that something seemingly so simple wouldn’t be easily quantified or measured.
As an MIT graduate he should be fully aware that many things in science are comparatively simple to describe/understand but extremely hard to measure – especially in bioscience. In this specific case many of the components of immune response actually can be measured, but it is quite difficult (read: costly) and has zero effect on practical treatment – therefore it is done only in research context. Silvaire wrote:
Hopefully after 100% of the population is vaccinated those “20%” (or 66,000,000 people in the US) won’t run into each other often for the rest of time, eh?
They will run into each other rarely enough for the virus to “dry out” – that is what we call “herd immunity”.
kwlf wrote:
All I know about it is that T-cells are apparently miserable to work with, and the sort of thing you might measure for research, but not on a routine basis.
Understood, thanks.
I used the phrase not ‘easily quantified or measured’ for a reason.
One can measure all these things but T4 is a very specialised test which nobody will do in volume. They did it for the 2003 SARS epidemic (which died out before money got invested in vaccine R&D) and found T4 immunity even after 18 years. But nobody knows whether this is relevant to CV19.
But that isn’t the real issue, which is that nobody has much of a clue what is driving these curves
The current speculation here in the UK is that the last spike is a massive infection rate at schools, which has now generated herd immunity in the schools and that is why it is coming back down again.
Is there anything in say the German press about why Germany had a similar rapid increase?
And what is France doing that’s so different?
