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Hmmm, I thought - in layman's terms - OAS (immune imprinting) basically meant that your first immune response to a pathogen set the tone for future immune responses to the same or similar pathogen. A suboptimal original immune response, in the case of the mRNA vaccine because it was specific to the S protein instead of the whole virus. …
Hmmm, I thought - in layman's terms - OAS (immune imprinting) basically meant that your first immune response to a pathogen set the tone for future immune responses to the same or similar pathogen. A suboptimal original immune response, in the case of the mRNA vaccine because it was specific to the S protein instead of the whole virus. This might result in a decreased ability to stave off subsequent symptomatic infections but shouldn't compromise the immune system's ability to combat severe illness so much. ADE, on the other hand, results in your immune system's inability to generate antibodies that are capable of recognizing and attacking the mutated virus. This essentially clears the way for the mutated variant to replicate unchecked, which results in a much greater vulnerability to both infection and severe illness.
The data we're seeing, mostly from other countries thus far, on Omicron seems to be suggesting an affinity for infecting vaccinated / boosted individuals relative to the unvaccinated, but not necessarily leading to more severe illness than in the vaccinated. So why wouldn't that be a greater signal of OAS than ADE? I mean, assuming OAS was actually a thing (I know you don't).
Because negative efficacy ≠ OAS. OAS is totally narrowly focused on generation of novel antibodies and has nothing to say about anything we know about immunity after 1960 - but it still retains "relevance" for vaccination. Lower-than-naive antigenic sensitivity to homologous versions of an antigen mean vaccination cannot generate antibodies to the homologous version. But *does* lower-than-naive antigenic sensitivity to homologous versions of previously-sensitized antigens have a real world relevance, even for the vaccinated? Neither "antibodies can mess up infection in other ways" nor "vaccine-induced immune response fails to induce the full suite of cellular memory immunity that we've come to discover after OAS was theorized" satisfy OAS. It's like asking whether nuclear fission "is alchemy."
I said layman's terms! LOL.
Just one point I wanted to make.... I don't think my simplification was implying that negative efficacy = OAS. Rather, it's breaking efficacy down into the individual components of infection, illness and death and then assigning them to possible differentiating signals . Or maybe what you're saying is that no matter which of those components you select, it doesn't or can't be a signal of OAS. It's probably that. Thanks for the response.