I told them so. Leaders.

But no. They wanted to be reckless… and here we are.

#ImmunityTheft
#DontPlayWithSARS

#ImmunityTheft

Some of our business press didn’t buy into immunity debt.

#Immunitytheft

ast fall, children in China were coming down with respiratory illnesses earlier and in greater numbers than usual. Ditto for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in the US and elsewhere in 2021 and 2022. And the current winter sea- son doesn't appear to be much differ- Medical News website ent as far as higher- than-usual case numbers, according to CDC surveillance data. The surging case numbers and their out-of-whack timing have fueled an ongoing debate about how the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to rates of other infectious dis-eases. No one yet knows for sure. "Right now, this is phenomenology," Wolfgang Leitner, PhD, chief of the Innate Immunity Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told JAMA in an interview. "People are assuming a lot about the mechanism." Much of the discussion has centered around immunity debt and immunity theft, terms born of the pandemic and not found in textbooks. The former generally refers to the reduced spread of other pathogens because of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPls) imposed to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, such as school closures and mask mandates. In early January of this year, a PubMed search for immunity debt resulted in only 22 hits, the earliest reference published online by French researchers in May 2021. "The lack of immune stimulation due to the reduced circulation of microbial agents and to the related reduced vaccine uptake induced an 'immunity debt' [that] could have negative consequences when the pandemic is under control and NPls are lifted," the authors predicted. Indeed, Chinese authorities have attributed the increase in influenzalike illnesses in their country to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and the circulation of known pathogens such as influenza and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, not some new JAMA February 6, 2024 Volume 331, Number 5 infectious agent, according to a November 22, 2023, statement from the World Health Organization. And as Leitner pointed out, echoing…

It's unlikely that immunity debt, or immunity gap, as some prefer to call it, completely explains recent surges in respiratory infection, Leitner acknowledged. "Re-duction in immune status is contributing to rebound, but I don't think it's the whole story," he said. Population vs Personal Immunity When it comes to protecting against viral infections, people can't have their cake and eat it, too. "In 2020, we needed lockdowns absolutely desperately," epidemiologist William Hanage, PhD, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, emphasized in an interview. He takes issue with those who suggest "that we would have been able to somehow come up with an optimal solution that would have both minimized the pandemic and these consequences for other infections." That notion, he says, "is utterly, utterly false." The effects on other infectious diseases of implementing and then lifting COVID-19 mitigation measures are not at all surprising, Hanage noted "Do you expect fewer infections in this season to end up leading to more infections next season? Yeah," he said. "That's the way it works. The interventions that were put in place and were extremely effective in bringing [COVID-19] surges under control also stopped other things. It's basic infectious disease epidemiology." Just don't call it immunity debt, Hanage urged. "I dislike the term. It suggests you've been sort of profligate, that you have not been taking care of your immunological finances. Immunity gap. I think, is a less-loaded term." There's precedent for the concept. Although immunity gap and immunity debt hadn't yet been coined at the time, a dip in respiratory infections due to social distancing followed by a rebound when people resumed normal activities occurred in France nearly 30 years ago, Leitner pointed out. During a Paris public transport workers strike that began on November 30, 1995, many people in the region-including children who nor…

deaths. For example, the Yamagata lineage of influenza B viruses, first identified in the 1980s, hasn't been isolated since March 2020, leading scientists to assume it is now extinct. And from 2019 to 2022, asthma attacks among US Black adults, who have higher rates than Hispanic or White adults, decreased from 29.3% to 22.1%, according to a national survey study published recently as a research letter. The authors noted that decreasing chronic airway disease exacerbations have been attributed at least in part to reduced circulation of common respiratory viruses. A 2023 review article he coauthored concluded that some long COVID symptoms may be due to chronic immune activation and the presence of persistent SARS-CoV-2 A Thieving Virus? Since the beginning of the pandemic, many people have either dismissed COVID-19 as nothing worse than a cold or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, have referred to it as airborne AIDS. "We work with children with HIV, and it's just offensive to see people make those kinds of statements," Munro said of comparing COVID-19 with AIDS. Reality lies somewhere between those extremes, experts say. Almost all viral respiratory infections, especially when they are severe, cause imA small study published in Cell in August 2023 found that severe COVID-19 can cause long-lasting immune system changes, but the alterations were related to persistent ac-tivation, not suppression. The researchers compared blood samples from 57 people, some who were recovering from severe COVID-19 or other severe illnesses and some who were healthy. They found gene expression differences in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPC- long-lived precursors to diverse immune cells-between the patients recovering from severe COVID-19 and the other study participants that persisted for up to 1 year after the patients became ill. In the recovering patients, those differences were associated with a higher production of white blood cells that seemed to produce more infla…

Their study didn't answer the question of whether COVID-19 infections might be linked to increased susceptibility to less serious non-COVID-19 infections, Andersson acknowledged in the email. "We do not include milder infections seen in primary care or those not requiring medical attention, and, as such, we cannot exclude that the risk of these infections could be increased," he wrote. He and his coauthors did find that people who'd been hospitalized for COVID-19 were more likely to be hospitalized for another infectious illness than those who'd never had COVID-19. "Not surpris-ingly, those individuals who had been hospitalized for one type of infection would tend to have higher odds of later being hospitalized for another infection," Andersson explained. No question, SARS-CoV-2 "messes with your immune system," Leitner said. "It kills T cells...What I don't know, and it hasn't been shown, is how much does that contribute in what we're seeing in terms of outbreaks? My theory is it contributes, but it's certainly not the only reason." Published Online: January 10, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.26608 Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Hanage reported serving as a paid scientific advisor to News & Analysis Merck Vaccines, Shionogi Inc, Pfizer, and Biobot Analytics, a company in which he holds stock options. Dr Erdmann reported serving as an investigator for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial and COVID-19 Prevention Network and the National Institutes of Health's Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery Initiative and COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines public-private partnership. Dr Erdmann also reported receiving payment for serving as a member of Perspectum's Scientific Advisory Board and having a patent for human neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 that has been licensed to the PlantForm Corp. No other disclosures were reported. Note: Source references are available through embedd…

Nor does immunity debt explain the rise in cases of other respiratory illnesses from TB to Mycoplasma. There is a better explanation. Namely, #ImmunityTheft jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Oh so no strawberries 🍓 or dogs 🐕 involved #ImmunityTheft #CovidKids

I just learned the term #immunitytheft today and it is apt. Really freaking on point for what is happening.

Looking at that graph, it’s almost as if other infections have become more deadly since #Covid emerged.

But I mean, that would mean everyone’s immune systems were getting worse, not getting stronger.

#immunitytheft
#flu #rsv #medsky

And it’s not immunity “debt”. Unless the toddlers were time travellers. 🙄 (No 3-4 year old has ever been in lockdown). But they’ve all had Covid-19. #immunityTheft.

Analysis: Why are B.C. kids sick all the time? Health experts explain

Analysis: Why are B.C. kids sick all the time? Health experts explain

Surrey Now-Leader
January 10, 2025
By Dr. Lyne Filiatrault, Arijit Chakravarty, T. Ryan Gregory

stillcoviding.ca/en/news/anal...

#CovidIsNotOver #ImmunityTheft #CdnPoli

#ImmunityTheft

#millionsmissing
#MEawarenesshour
#MECFS #PEM #POTS #pacing #Immunitytheft

Rachel Thomas, PhD - Your Immune System is Not a Muscle an AI researcher going back to school for immunology

Your Immune System is not a muscle
#CovidIsNotOver
#ImmunityTheft
rachel.fast.ai/posts/2024-0...

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙞𝙨 𝙄𝙈𝙈𝙐𝙉𝙄𝙏𝙔 𝘿𝙀𝘽𝙏?
Two 🧵 by @ejustin46.bsky.social
threadreaderapp.com/thread/18047...
threadreaderapp.com/thread/18047...

#Covid #LongCovid #ImmunityDebt #ImmunityTheft

#COVIDPandemic #immunitytheft #medsky