mellowtigger | SARS-CoV-2 antibodies

I saved this news for Moody Monday, but it's also partly a Good News item. Really.

Researchers revealed (still in pre-print) a detectable cause for some of the myriad symptoms of Long Covid. They transferred particular SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from humans into mice, then those mice developed a similar subset of Long Covid disease symptoms as the humans who provided those antibodies. This discovery that pinpoints a mechanism of injury means that treatments (not necessarily cures yet) are possible for at least some of the debilitating effects of infection. That's finally some very good news. One of the authors posted a thread on Xitter, but here's the rollup of that information:

Strikingly, transfer of IgG antibodies of Long-COVID patients strongly induced symptoms in mice! Most pronounced was the induction of pain, measured with e.g. a Von Frey test (Long-COVID IgG in green, lower indicates more pain; log scale). Since Long-COVID is a very heterogeneous disease (different symptoms, severity, etc.) we also tried to divide the patients into separate groups. With a little help from proteomics (proteins in blood) we identified three groups (color coded red/grey/yellow). Interestingly, antibodies from different patient-groups induced different symptoms in mice! Group-yellow IgG immediately induced pain symptoms, group-red induced delayed symptoms. Remarkable: group-grey IgG induced no pain, but was the only group to induce immobility. So in short: 1. IgG antibodies from Long-COVID patients induce symptoms in mice, indicating autoimmunity plays a causal role in this disease. 2. Antibodies from different subgroups induce distinct symptoms, indicating the presence of multiple (groups of) auto-antibodies... Another cool thing: our findings seem to have been independently validated by the @PutrinoLab, who recently showed similar preliminary data on this scientific conference (May 2024)

Here's a video presentation (YouTube, 10 minutes) of this material about PASC (aka Long Covid). It mostly went over my head, but I noticed that they're also accepting persistent infection as another potential cause of long term disease.

So, not only does the spike protein alone cause blood clots, but the antibodies alone seem to cause further disease symptoms. Whether vaccination or virus exposure, there may be consequences no matter how we acquire these proteins. "The only winning move is not to play." (movie quote explanation) People are already asking good questions about what this transferrability means for the medical blood supply. The USA CDC has a lot to say about Long Covid, and their most recent estimate is that about 17.8% of people in the USA (which works out to almost 60 million Americans) have ever experienced symptoms of it. As I keep saying, the world changed in 2019 December. Everything about this terrible virus is fascinating. We will learn so much about human biology from this ongoing global event.