Thread by @DonEford

Most folks don't understand imprinting as a concept including many of our "leading experts."

The reason we know this is that imprinting is the reason hybrid immunity is not effective, while it does reduce the risk of death during acute...it does nothing for the 200+ LC symptoms.

We look at antibodies in most hybrid immunity studies very broadly as a concept...

When in reality antibodies are very specific to each variant... so while you might have high antibodies to COVID it does not mean it is protective against new variants.

This has been demonstrated

Imprinting is best connected to the immune memory response in concept.... when you have an antigen exposure that creates an imprint that your immune system recognizes and recreates upon reexposure.

After more antigen exposures, either vax or infection, then that rewrites itself.

So, if you have an infection to Delta and then later an infection with Omicron, the first response antibodies are going to be Delta antibodies and are going to be largely ineffective.

They should protect from death during acute phase, but they make your LC risk higher...

And what we are not talking about is that a COVID infection increases your risk by at least 5x per infection, which means if LC is in 100% of cases because this risk is consistent across all infections...

Then this is actually putting people at risk of death.

Now for mRNA, the antibodies are far more specific so imprinting is more of an issue... so again, it will protect from death, in most cases, but it will not protect from LC which has an associated risk of death.

Novavax does not have these issues because of Matrix-M.

While Novavax is still not perfect, its adjuvant shrinks the antigenic range between variants...

This mean that antibodies for Delta are going to work on Omicron if you had multiple Nova shots, three to be precise...

So moving forward we can assume the same thing will be true.

If you get XBB.1.5 antibodies and the virus continues to mutate... further Novavax shots will not only rebuild your antibody response, but it will also shrink the range between variants so that imprinting is less of an issue as your old antibodies work on the new variants.

If this sounds like magic to you, I don't blame you.

Matrix-M is a paradigm shift in how we look at both vaccines and public health...

But that being said this is a clear examination of why all the excitement about Hybrid immunity is not effective and our leaders don't get it.

In the same way that not all masks are good enough for COVID...

Not all antibodies are effective against COVID.

I said in Jan 2021 that there was no immunity to future variants from a current COVID infections...

And imprinting as a concept is the reason why that happens.

@joaquinlife that is correct

BTW, I said that Long COVID happens in 100% of cases earlier in the tweet and this is the correct way to think about LC... even though they are trying, again, really hard to define it for less folks...

We think of risk of LC wrong, it's risk of death not risk of disability...

The increased risk of death happens in every infection.

So if LC risk is based on increased risk of death...

Then it's 100% of cases.

And, last I checked, death is a LC symptom.