What's The Difference Between Toast And Your Immune System After A Second Booster?

If you answered ‘nothing’ or ‘very little’ then you’re probably more right than wrong. Poor Elon. What was he thinking? Is the richest man in the world also not up there among the smartest?

You remember that recent study which demonstrated that several months after the first booster, there was a huge and unexpected increase in IgG4 antibodies, indicative of immune tolerance to the SC-2 spike protein antigen? Well now we have this additional Chinese study highlighted by Alex Berenson:

VERY URGENT: After four shots, Covid jabs sharply REDUCED immune function in mice

They used mice and they didn’t use a LNP or viral vector to deliver mRNA or DNA to code for the spike, they introduced the receptor binding domain (RBD) part of the spike directly, but even so, what they found is very concerning:

We found that the conventional immunization course could stimulate sustained levels of neutralizing antibodies and promote the antigen specific CD4+ and CD8+T cell reactivity. However, continued vaccination promoted the formation of a prominent adaptive immune tolerance and profoundly impaired the established immune response with the conventional course, evidenced by significant reductions in antigen specific antibody and T cell response, a loss of immune memory and form of immunosuppression micro-environment. Our findings demonstrated the potential risks associated with an extended vaccine booster course of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, with immediate implications for the strategic use of homology booster vaccines.

We found that the protective effects from the humoral immunity and cellular immunity established by the conventional immunization were both profoundly impaired during the extended vaccination course. Specifically, extended vaccination not only fully impaired the amount and the neutralizing efficacy of serum RBD-specific antibodies, but also shortened the long-term humoral memory. This is associated with immune tolerance in germinal center response, along with decreased numbers of spleen germinal center B and Tfh cells. Moreover, we demonstrated that extended immunization reduced the functional responses of CD4+ and CD8+T cells, restrained the population of memory T cells, and up-regulated the expression of PD-1 and LAG-3 in Te sub-type cells. An increased percentile of Treg cells was also observed, accompanied by significant elevation of IL-10 production. Together, we provided crucial evidence that repetitive administration of RBD booster vaccines may negatively impact the immune response established by a conventional vaccination course and promote adaptive immune tolerance.

What they call the “conventional immunization course” is two injections plus two boosters. In other words, they found that subsequent booster injections were causing major problems. The ‘benefit from the second booster was very brief and it appears to have initiated a downward spiral leading to a complete absence of neutralising antibody response, after the 5th and 6th doses.

In our recent study, a three-dose course of RBD vaccines successfully yielded both humoral and cellular immune protection for 4 months in a Balb/c mice model (Gao et al., 2021). In the current study, we found that a subsequent fourth administration of the same vaccine continued to stimulate the production of RBD-specific neutralizing antibodies, whose serum levels were sustained for at least 6 weeks. These findings were in accordance with the reported neutralizing effect of the fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine on the SARS-CoV-2 mutants (Tanne, 2022). However, when we administrated additional doses of the same vaccine booster, with the attempt to induce a similarly enhanced or at least sustained immune response, we observed an overt reduction of the overall immune responses.

But what is crucial to note here is that these researchers were working over timescales of weeks; they weren’t measuring the long term adaptive immune response. Which makes it particularly worrying, because we know that significant immune tolerance begins to develop months after the first booster even. These scientists found that immune tolerance in mice, injected with the RBD antigen, began to develop immediately after the second booster and the damage was profound. This does not bode well for those people who have subjected themselves to a fourth, fifth or even sixth shot, not in the short term or the long term. Maybe Elon will be lucky as he’s only had the “conventional immunization course”, which began as two shots, then three and now appears to be four.