Message from Mike Yeadon :
My message is a plea not to be fooled by the Great Lie of 2021, that “variants escape our immune defences so we’ll need repeated vaccination”.
I am deeply concerned about this lie & what it may portend.
Would you please share this as widely as you can?
Many thanks,
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.06.21254882v2
Dear humanity,
I just read this ‘study’ claiming that, in vaccinated individuals, a variant of concern (VoC) appeared more frequently than in non-vaccinated individuals.
They’re implying that such VoC ‘escape our immunity’, attacking us as if we had no immunity.
It’s complete nonsense.
They tested ‘carriers’ (note choice of the word, which you’d never use, because the clear implication is of an ability to infect others with this VoC, something for which there’s absolutely no evidence) & these people are clinically well, with no symptoms.
They did find the VoC more often than in a claimed matching group of unvaccinated individuals.
So what? There are numerous possible reasons for this, the most likely being that they’re not measuring what they think they are.
Crucially, the VoC differs so little from the original virus that it’s impossible that, despite being immune after vaccination, it somehow “escapes their immune system”.
The referenced work, showing that certain circulating antibodies are less effective in blocking the interaction involving a VoC (a synthesised portion of the virus & an artificial binding receptor for spike protein) is an example of very poor science.
The whole set up plays to the idea that it is mostly or wholly just the antibodies that confer & are responsible for the functional immunity acquired after vaccination (or natural infection). Yet there’s no evidence for this at all.
Indeed, it’s intrinsically unlikely. Antibodies are very large molecules which are mostly considered to be outside cells, either in blood or in the spaces between cells outside of the blood supply or, in some specialised circumstances, secreted onto outward-facing body surfaces (as described by Sucharit earlier in this thread).
Plausibly, such antibodies could play an important role in preventing reinfection, during the period while the invading virus pathogen is in those compartments described, outside cells.
But no serious immunologist would fail to recognise that, during clinically relevant illness caused by this virus, most of the battle between virus-infected tissues & our immune systems takes place when the virus is INSIDE OUR CELLS.
The virus must be inside our cells in order to take over the replication apparatus of the cell, that being the only way in which the virus can multiply. Our cells are forced to make multiple copies of the virus, before that cell dies, liberating many more virus particles.
During this process, repeated again & again, it’s not possible that antibodies, mostly restricted to the outside of cells, has any important function in host defence.
That role is mostly performed by CD8+ cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (aka “T-cells” or “T-memory cells”). An infected cell has no choice but to signal that it’s occupied & it does so by placing on its external surface fragments of the invading virus.
These signals are detected in a highly-specific way by T-memory cells, which then attack the infected cells & kill them, along with viruses inside.
They do not attack healthy cells.
Now, the breadth & detail of recognition of the virus and EVERY VARIANT of the virus is so great that it’s literally impossible for infected cells not to be detected as infected. This is because the changes to the virus are minuscule & so at most, only a few of the flags placed on the outside of infected cells are different from those our immune systems have seen before.
Conversely almost all the infection-signalling flags are identical to those we’ve seen before & our cellular immunity (T-cells) easily & speedily mop up infected tissues so readily that clinical infection is prevented.
This isn’t a theory or speculation.