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:

Buhre, JS. et al.

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:

Tolerance Cometh: IgG4 After Multiple-mRNA Doses

Tolerance (Maims and) Kills - Potential Examples

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

click button or visit https://ko-fi.com/unglossed