Tolerance Replicated: Moderna Über Alles
Brief notes on the new tolerance study.
I should briefly mention, last night my pinky was crushed in an industrial post-exercise-dog-attack-while-carrying-my-weights-back-from-the-beach accident (the first two, from the right, were remarkably earnest; the third, which is known to have bit people before and had been roped only half an hour prior, came from the left so suddenly that I simply fell backward, weights still in hand; at least this didn’t result in literally tumbling down the stone steps I had just emerged from). This will result in reduced verbosity for this post; the duration of interference on my typing is obviously too early to call.
Igor reported last night here.
The Study:
Takeaways:
Affirms results of Irrgang, et al. Previously reviewed in “Tolerance Cometh.” (This includes IgG4 conversion emerging some months after the second dose, which I highlighted at the time.)
The new study only includes healthcare workers, who presumably received the first-shipped product with the most stringent injection protocol management (storage, dilution, etc.).
However, Irrgang, et al. (the previous study)’s “Cohort 2” tentatively reproduces IgG4 conversion in a mixed (HCW and general) population. So this all should apply to most, though maybe not all, recipients. But we don’t really know anything about the real-life consistency of these products, as has been detailed by Sasha Latypova.
IgG4 conversion in Moderna recipients, which were not included in Irrgang, et al., reach “stratospheric” heights compared Pfizer recipients.
Though it should be noted that overall IgG4 is still low compared to overall IgG1. This can be seen in Fig. 2 (by comparing the scales, which are not the same).
Buhre, JS. et al. Fig. 2 Ok there’s blood on my keyboard now. That’s keyboard blood.
However, as my annotation remarks, what counts is the portion of anti-spike B Cells that have converted to IgG4. These are essentially the “defectors” in the B Cell pool that decide spike should not activate complement-mediated and cellular immune responses. Buhre, et al. have made this somewhat parse-able in Fig S3; just bear in mind once again that the scale for IgG4 and IgG1 are not the same.
I don’t know why a plot wasn’t provided for two-course Moderna. So, to gauge the difference between Moderna († and ‡) and BNT162b2 (§) on an even playing-field, I used the AstraZeneca+other day 209+ plot. From this, we get a rough impression (though antibodies only indirectly reflect B Cell pools) that the worst Moderna converters are about ~3 to 5 times as bad as the worst Pfizer/BioNTech converter. This isn’t surprising given that the former delivers 100μg RNA per dose in the primary and booster series, vs. the latter’s 30.
Related:
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You are literally bleeding in order to give us this information. Thanks for chiming in about this study - great information between you, modern discontent and igor. Wishing you a speedy healing.
OH NOOO!!! Feel better!! Wishing you a speedy healing and thank you for sharing while injured!