These days, our hospitals are filling up with children who have difficulty breathing and doctors are telling us that we need to return to mask mandates. Andrew Nikiforuk writes:
Nearly three years into the pandemic, it’s clear early expectations about the behaviour of the coronavirus and its toll on our bodies have proven overly optimistic.
Recall those early days when experts broadly assumed that once we’d withstood an infection our immune systems would adjust and fully resist another reinfection.
And then hopes rose that mass vaccination would provide the path out of the pandemic. Although vaccines did reduce deaths and hospitalizations, the effort failed to produce herd immunity.
However variants emerged, capable of evading those antibodies. Many people who had been vaccinated or already had endured a bout of COVID were experiencing “breakthrough infections.” What could put the brakes on this ever-evolving virus, which can kill, damage organs and linger for months?
The answer from many scientists has been T cells — our bodies’ line of immune defence after antibodies. T cells can spot and attack viruses and even remember previous invaders. As virologist Vincent Racaniello titled one of his articles: “T cells will save us from COVID-19.”
But scientists have begun to ask, "What if COVID wears down T cells?"
That concern lies at the heart of a rolling, rancorous scientific debate, a lot of it conducted on Twitter. A person at the centre of the storm, sounding alarms about T cell “dysregulation” since the early days of the pandemic, has been a U.S. immunologist named Anthony Leonardi.
By dysregulation Leonardi means three effects of COVID:
The hyperactivation of many T cells, which can prematurely age them
The exuberant function of those hyperactivated T cells, which can then cause organ damage
The exhaustion of those hyperactivated T cells, which implies they aren’t winning the battle against viral proteins they are supposed to defeat.
In other words, argues Leonardi, T cells are becoming hyperactivated by SARS-CoV-2 and are prematurely aging, harming organs, and becoming exhausted trying to rid the body of an immune-evasive virus.
If he is right, then no, we cannot assume that T cells will save us — not as thoroughly, at least, as we’ve been led to believe.
The virus refuses to die. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre says that, while he doesn't support the violent behaviour of the truckers, he does support their demand to be free of vaccines.
In the face of the evidence, is this truly smart policy?
Image: You Tube
