46 Comments
Feb 12, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

Isn't the OAS thesis not that the individual is more/less susceptible but that the interaction of imperfect abs and virus leads to dominant escape variants which return to reinfect and impair/prevent "herd immunity"

That could be bad or good depending on whether viruses get worse or milder. Not been in narrative.

From this perspective the "higher AB counts " "similar to severe infection" indicate an AB /immune response that is ineffective - hence the high number allowing relatively longer infection transmission windows and higher mutation , etc etc. in the least conserved target

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Feb 10, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

Hi Brian,

Spotted this as a question/answer in Rintrah's comments page yesterday:

'How about if you got vaccinated, and then get infected? Is the vaccine an obstacle to your immune response?

In that case you get to deal with original antigenic sin. Specifically it seems your body will struggle to develop an antibody response against the Nucleocapsid protein.'

There's been quite a lot about this inability of the vaccinated since the 'data' from a look at UK blood donors. Is there a struggle to deal with the nucleocapsid in the vaccinated and even if there is, how permanent and how important might it be do you think?

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Thank you for assessing that study. I've had a lot of difficulties assessing all of this OAS information, but I always felt so much of this is being misattributed or incorrectly analyzed.

I have a friend who got her PhD in immunology and I asked her about OAS because I kept seeing it pop up. She laughed at it and essentially said that it's the "frat guy" in the immunology world, and apparently many graduate students try to bring it up in an attempt to lay some type of claim to aspects of the hypothesis.

I remember reading an abstract from one of the original OAS papers where they studies this in mice models. The researchers indicated that OAS is likely to be a heuristic approach, and I think we tend to miss that.

It's not that OAS is completely evil, but if OAS is to occur it's intent is for the body to elicit a prior immune response. If it's good enough to clear out the virus, then why waste all of this time and energy mounting a giant immune response to something you already had knowledge of before. It's strange because Dr. Malone made the same remark in his Joe Rogan interview: It's mounting an attack against the enemy you know.

I found it really strange how many people seemed to have clasped onto this concept, all the way down to the religious implications of the phrase. I also blame that UK dataset that began circulating. I actually wrote my posts on OAS because someone reached out to me commenting that they thought people were really not examining the data properly.

Hopefully the paranoia around OAS dies down. There's far more important things to consider aside from OAS that there are likely to be greater evidence to support.

Also, the irony is not lost on me that those who continue to evoke OAS are themselves trapped in their own OAS cycle. Not everything is OAS and it certainly should not be evoked every time someone mentions anything in regards to immunology.

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Hi, Brian!

I must confess that some of the points you made in this article baffled me on first read.

I understand that you don't think that any good evidence for OAS has been mounted, and I get that our immune systems are far more more complex and adaptive than OAS theorists would have us believe.

However, I am having trouble integrating your analysis into the bigger picture.

I was wondering if you would be so kind as to answer some very basic questions.

On a personal level, who do you think, if anyone, would be well served by getting Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines?

If someone were to be forced to get one of the currently US approved vaccines for the first time, which one would you currently recommend?

Who do you think, if anyone, would be well served by getting Pfizer and Moderna mRNA boosters?

On a population level, what populations, if any, would you have recommended these mRNA vaccines to? Has the emergence Delta and then Omicron changed your analysis? If so, how?

What is your analysis of the trajectory of Marek's disease in chickens? How likely do you think mass vaccination with leaky vaccines during a pandemic could result in such a disaster among humans?

I realize that I may be asking you to bite off more than you would like to chew, but I truly value your perspective and would love any answers you could give me no matter how few or short.

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Feb 9, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

You're doing a great job with this. This is what my intuition was telling me. The immune system of a Wuhan-spike vaccinated person will respond, initially with the antibodies that it already knows how to make - the wuhan-spike antibodies, but all the while the process of learning how to make antibodies to the new spike protein is initiated. If the wuhan spike antibodies, along with innate immunity, quickly clear the infection, the immune system will not have that much exposure to the new spike and so won't learn to make antibodies to it to a great extent. The more the infection with the new spike progresses, the more exposure to it the immune system will have and the more it will learn to make antibodies specific to the new spike. So, it's not as if your immune system is unable to learn to make any new antibodies just because it already knows how to make some similar antibodies. Remember, the first time you're exposed it takes 8 days for you to really have any significant antibodies. So, it's not like you ever really have an immediate robust antibody response to a new antigen. You can only have an immediate, robust antibody response to a pathogen with the same antigen as one you've previously been infected with. To show that OAS is a real problem, they'd have to show that these same people got reinfected with Omicron, yet again, and still did not make any omicron specific antibodies. Even then it would only be a problem if said infections were more than just mild. If they were mild, it may just mean that the immune system never learned to make antibodies that are specific to the new antigen because it didn't need to because the innate arm and old antibodies fought it off so quickly that the immune system didn't really have enough exposure to learn to make the new antibodies well. But 'so what?' in that case. It just means that the tools the immune system already has have this pathogen well under control.

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Feb 9, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

Great post as always! Out of curiosity (I don't actually care about credentials - arguments should be judged based on their content alone), are you a biologist or doctor by trade? How'd you develop your framework for understanding human immunology?

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Feb 8, 2022·edited Feb 8, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

I was under the (apparently erroneous) impression that OAS meant when a new variant (V.2) stopped by, you generated antibodies for a previous variant (V.1) exclusively, none of which bound to V.2 epitopes, rendering you completely vulnerable to the new variant (V.2).

This to me would be the ONLY reason it would be an issue.

If, instead, you generate antibodies (quickly, because you are already primed / learned with V.1) for V.1 (V.1 = V.2 epitope subset A) and more slowly / less of them as first exposure, but still reliably to V.2 (V.2 =/= V.1 epitope subset B) - this is what I would expect, given genetic drift means some epitopes will remain the same (V.1 epitope subset A = V.2 epitope subset A), and some will change (V.1 epitope subset B =/= V.2 epitope subset B).

It seems impossible to me that the "wrong" antibodies can be generated for a given epitope (what I thought OAS proponents were claiming). That's just not how the process works, which is why OAS has always seemed ridiculous to me, and why I looked for but never found the mechanism described that meant an epitope E.76 being presented to B cells with appropriate co-stimulation resulted in anything but E.76 B cell antibody factory being created.

OAS fans were, I thought, claiming presenting an E.76 epitope to an unrelated / ineffective E.12 B cell resulted in that B cell proliferating and spamming out useless antibodies to E.12. Still seems nonsensical.

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"The non-Covid-vaccinated have no previously circulating B Cells for the Wuhan spike."

Assuming they were not infected with the original Wuhan strain yes?

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Feb 8, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

This is such a beautiful, thorough and phenomenally impressive analysis of OAS...and...I'm a complete layman (well, I know a little). Please don't be angry if I ask this, but is there a layman's version of what this says? I feel it's important to share w/my friends and family who are still racing to get boosters, but they will not understand it, and I am unable to summarize it :(. (I realize I am probably not your target audience...but I found you recently and understood (mostly :) ) those articles.) In any case, THANK YOU for sharing your work!!!

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Feb 8, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

My layperson analogy is holding somewhat true still; we are priming and priming the engine and now it wont even start. Just a big cloud of black smoke through the tailpipe and a ruined engine for life. That is some real bad gas too, like sugar in the gas tank.

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