Thread by @ProfAndrewShaw

Antibody Affinity Maturation to SARS-CoV-2 #Omicron Variants in a #Teachers Cohort medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our study, released on @medrxivpreprint this week, looked at the #Covid immunity response of a cohort of primary school staff: 61% had been infected in the 6 months prior to their @Attomarker test and were probably exposed to BA1 or BA.4/5.

The good news is that a number of teachers developed high-quality #antibodies, both in concentration and quality and tuned to the local variant. We think this may have been because they had been repeatedly exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

It is rare for children to get very sick from Covid but they are known symptomatic and asymptomatic spreaders, which makes teachers and parents particularly vulnerable to infection.

We believe the teachers are a critical #pandemic perimeter that should be “smart boosted” (alongside other at-risk groups) to maintain sufficient antibody quantity and protection against infection.

Teachers are important, we know that losing time in school can create lasting problems for children. “Smart boosting” supports health & protects education. Parents constitute a major proportion of the workforce, smart boosting this group should also protect economic productivity.

There was a more negative finding: some teachers made low concentrations of poor-quality antibodies that may not clear the infection well. One teacher now has #LongCovid. It is possible that poor antibodies lead to a poor clearance of the virus and perhaps viral persistence,

leading to susceptibility to LC. Do these microcolonies of virus float, like tiny and highly toxic islands, around the body, triggering local inflammatory responses in the heart, the brain, pancreas or the lungs leading to symptoms of Long Covid and other diseases like diabetes?

We hope our new variant antibody fidelity spectrum research test could be used by doctors as a new diagnostic for Long Covid susceptibility (on a “named patient basis”). Maybe everyone recovering from a Covid infection could eventually have an antibody fidelity test (AFT) to see

if they are particularly at risk of viral persistence and Long Covid? It is clear we all need to avoid Covid if we can, and particularly avoid getting multiple infections in a year.
Antibody fitness matters.