Infant/Young Children Antibody Response Against SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Duration Markedly Superior to Adults
Push to vaccinate children not based on the facts
Researchers affiliated with Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues represented by Jens Wrammert, Ph.D., investigated the natural immune response of children. Although understudied during the earlier parts of the pandemic, it emerged that adults could mount broad and durable immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, the natural immunity features in children remain understudied and not well understood.
Interestingly, although severe cases of SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, have in all reality been quite rare in the infant/child cohort, infants as young as six months old to young children became intense targets for vaccination by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In this study, the Emory University physicians and scientists, along with colleagues, investigated humoral responses to COVID-19 in 23 infants/young children prior to and post-COVID-19 infection. Finding that in this vulnerable cohort, antibody responses to SARS-COV-2 spike antigens peaked about 30 days after infection, they were maintained for 500 days with minimal decay—representing a major finding.
The results of the findings here cannot be ignored (although they need to be peer-reviewed and published)—infants and young children’s natural immune response to COVID-19 appears to last markedly longer than adults! Yet this group was targeted intensively for vaccination with little data associated with this vulnerable cohorts’ immune response and COVID-19.
The findings
Finding that the levels of humoral responses in the infant and children cohort were comparable to a recovered adult cohort who recovered from mild/moderate COVID-19, the authors report “both binding and neutralization titers in WT SARS-CoV-2 were more durable in infants/young children, with spike and RBD IgG antibody half-life nearly 4X as long as in adults.”
Addressing comparable “functional breadth” of both adults as well as young children and infants and their responses to COVID-19, they found a “similar reactivity against a panel of recent and previously circulating viral variants.”
Importantly when conducting an IgG subtype analysis, the study team reports the following observations:
IgG1 more prevalent in both adults and infants and young children response to SARS-CoV-2
IgG3 more frequently prevalent in adults
IgG2 more frequently prevalent in infants/young children
Implications
The study authors point out that these findings “raise important questions regarding differential regulation of humoral immunity in infants/young children and adults,” which could have implications for not only when vaccine boosters are given but also overall booster strategies in the age cohort.
Breakdown
First and foremost, the authors recognize that about 25% of all COVID-19 cases in infants and young children are asymptomatic and that there are few COVID-19-related deaths associated with this vulnerable age group.
But why have national health authorities been keen on vaccination of children as young as six months?
One prominent reason is because severe COVID-19 is more common in young infants as compared to older children. This is possibly because the immune system in children so young is still developing. Frankly, little is known about how the immature immune system of a six-month-old infant reacts to COVID-19, or for that matter, how COVID-19 infection may impact the young child’s immune system.
Also, the durability of the very young person to infant’s immunity is even less understood, writes the Emory University affiliated authors.
Why is it so difficult to understand young children's immune system and, thus, response to COVID-19?
It’s quite difficult to design and execute multi-sample longitudinal studies in this cohort, among other factors. Consequently, the importance of studying not only the initial magnitude but also the long-term durability of infection-induced immune responses in this vulnerable cohort (infant to young children) becomes mission critical.
So, is it possible that in absence of this vitally important data an assumption was made that vaccination for children as young as six is vitally important for protection?
Absolutely. hat assumption is bolstered by data showing (via correlates of protection) that COVID-19 vaccination induced protective antibodies in young children and infants.
But what about for a more optimized, scientifically-driven vaccination scheme in very young children and infants—isn’t more data needed?
Absolutely, and that fact represents a key driver for this study. The authors point out that “a deeper understanding of the breadth of humoral immune responses against continuously emerging viral variants in infants/young children is vital for optimizing the timing of current vaccination strategies in this age group.”
Where did the investigators in the current study obtain the data?
The study team was able to tap into and leverage findings from a prospective, longitudinal birth cohort of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination in early life conducted at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center—known as the IMPRINT study (NCT05436184).
What’s the IMPRINT study?
As reported in the preprint server medRxiv, IMPRINT involved the weekly administration of mid-turbinate nasal swabs offering the ability to identify in real-time the presence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in infants and young children.
The study team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, led by Principal Investigator Mary Staat, MD, MPH, collected multiple blood samples from a targeted 1,500 infant participants over a period of up to 500 days post the initial positive SARS-CoV-2 swab.
Thereafter, the study team compared and analyzed an adult cohort (involving previously collected blood samples) from patients with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 that were followed up for up to 350 days post-infection.
Why are the findings notable in this study?
The Emory University affiliated authors and colleagues point out that:
“While the initial magnitude of the SARS-CoV-2 specific antibody response in adults and infants/young children was comparable, the titers in our infant cohort were maintained over the study period, while in adults, the titers declined with a half-life of 180 days.”
The authors point to four other studies backing these findings.
What else is noteworthy in the current study?
While the investigators' most recent finding suggests a “major difference in terms of durability of humoral immunity” between adults and children (children’s natural immunity against COVID-19 last longer!), the team reports that “the breadth of these responses was similar in adults and infants/young children.” This means that the immune response was comparable against an array of SARS-CoV-2 variants.
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Challenging Covid’s tyranny came at a heavy personal price
Adam Creighton
Three years ago this month my life was turned upside down when I suggested in this column we might be overreacting to Covid-19.
The column triggered a torrent of hate mail that lasted well over a year, and I began to receive persistent and violent threats. I was forced to change my name on social media accounts and my parents became seriously worried for my safety. Some of the attacks were so awful, I considered taking legal action.
It was less than a month after England’s chief health officer, Chris Whitty, explained at a press conference that Covid-19 was not a particularly lethal virus, many wouldn’t get it, and of those who did the vast bulk wouldn’t know they had it, or suffer only a “mild to moderate” illness at worse.
Those facts never changed, but it was too late. By mid-April, our ostensibly civil and rational society had lost its mind, consumed by an insidious culture of consent.
All that mattered was stopping the virus – which most of us ended up getting at least once – and to hell with the human rights, social and economic costs, or earlier pandemic plans.
“Perhaps a hysteria has gripped the nation … the hankering for total lockdown was being cheered on largely by those who would be relatively unaffected by it … the costs will be profound,” I wrote, in what was the first of many criticisms that followed.
But I couldn’t have imagined back then just how damning the data would become, as a new book by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus, now makes clear.
The benefits of our authoritarian response proved so meagre, the costs so enormous – including the inflation we’re still enduring – the last few years must qualify as the biggest public policy disaster outside of wartime.
Australian governments sprayed the best part of half a trillion dollars of public funds against the wall; not to mention the disruption they caused to ordinary lives in the community.
According to OECD data, we ended up with around the same or even a greater number of excess deaths over the last three years as Sweden, a country that was relentlessly attacked for allowing its people to maintain normal lives, with a similar rate of urbanisation and development to Australia.
“I thought Sweden would have higher excess mortality but less economic and social damage, but it had a lower mortality as well,” noted British science writer Matt Ridley last month, after it became clear no matter how the statistics were cut, Sweden emerged with relatively few excess deaths; indeed fewer, or around the same, as Australia.
“Quite astounding: Sweden took a lot of flak for its Covid-19 policies but actually it has done best in Europe,” added Danish environmental analyst Bjorn Lomborg.
On some measures, Sweden did better than any other developed nation on excess deaths. If there is a greater humiliation of experts in modern history, I’m yet to hear it.
The same was true in some parts of the US, which for political and constitutional reasons, managed to resist the zeitgeist, recording the same, or fewer deaths than other jurisdictions, without the destructive madness.
Historians will not look back at the figures of how many died from or with Covid-19. Instead they will look at excess deaths, the number of deaths compared to what might have been expected.
But the coup de grace must belong to China, whose policies in Wuhan inspired many governments to junk their pandemic plans, which had previously emphasised keeping calm and running societies as normally as possible.
In 2020, China’s response was widely praised, based on the CCP’s own dubious Covid-19 figures. But the country’s lockdowns spectacularly failed to contain the virus, and appeared to make little difference when they were ultimately lifted – to the disappointment of those desperate to keep the flame of authoritarianism alive.
Liberal democracies failed miserably during the pandemic, as our institutions, media, academia and bureaucracies careened into hysteria and authoritarianism, trashing human rights and traditional medical ethics over a virus that our grandparents would’ve barely noticed.
You can only imagine what a slightly more lethal virus would have done. As a society we are far less rational and free than we claim.
The gap between our civilisation and China’s has shrunk markedly, too, as government institutions worked hand-in-hand in the US (of all places) with social media companies to suppress dissent and bolster the “the science”, which turned out to be wrong on almost everything. The pandemic response in Australia and elsewhere was a harbinger of a totalitarian future that surely none of us want to encourage.
In my view, those deserving the greatest contempt are the tenured academics and senior public servants who, unless they were mentally deficient, must have known from a very early stage in the pandemic that “the measures” were failing, but continued to cheer them on anyway.
Only an honest evaluation of the gigantic errors of the past can steel us against a repeat of such extremism.
It is fitting, then, to quote the 17th-century Swedish statesman, Axel Oxenstierna, who once commented: “Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?”
If we didn’t know then, we certainly do now.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, April 18, 2023
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