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by mlyle 1994 days ago
> This seems very circular to me. If they don't build very effective antibodies, they shouldn't be putting much selective pressure on the virus, because if they did, they'd be more effective in the first place.

If a normal person generates a dozen types of antibodies to the vaccine's spike protein, and a couple types are strongly sterilizing...

And you happen to have an immune response where you generate 8/12 of these, and only one of the strongly sterilizing variant, and you are more prone to become infected as a result...

Then, once infected, the virus will be under selective pressure during your illness to escape some of those 8 antibodies. In turn, whomever you spread it to will have a harder time.

> Maybe multiple vaccines mitigates this a bit...

Maybe. But the portion of the spike protein they're expressing and the resulting antibody profiles look very similar.

> Given Jan-Mar 2019, I have little faith that the US would ever be in a position to fully eradicate even a small remaining bit, and it would instead fester and mutate in this scenario until exploding again.

Yes, but one silver lining is that there would still be some immunity / cross-reactivity / t cell mediated immunity, etc. People would still be less likely to have severe illness, I believe.

1 comments

It's a lot more complex than that. Immune responses are a lot more complex than antibodies. People can actually get rid of an infection before they have a lot of antibodies.

The virus in this case would have to evolve in your body to escape not just 4-6 of the 12 antibodies, but most of them, otherwise it still won't be able to cause productive infections before it starts getting neutralized and the immune system detecting neutralized viruses mounts a stronger response.

Yes. I know immunology is way more complicated than I understand, and that I'm oversimplifying even from my level of understanding. There's all kinds of immune responses we're interested in here.

However, sterilizing antibodies are most interesting because they are the strongest factor in preventing transmission.

People with weak immune responses of various kinds can be expected to have more infections and to be infected for longer times, and they provide selective pressure to evade the remaining mechanisms.