this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
306 points (98.1% liked)

World News

38278 readers
2657 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Scientists have discovered antibodies that can neutralize virtually all known variants of the COVID-19 virus, potentially preventing future coronavirus outbreaks.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Great news if this can be developed into a universal covid vaccine with no side effects that everyone can take

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The same news got posted to reddit over a year ago(https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pd5v8r/antibody_found_that_neutralizes_all_known_strains/) and someone commented something similar to your comment. Because I am lazy, I am simply quoting, whatI wrote back then:

That is not how vaccinations work! If it did, fighting viruses would be far easier.

If you inject a load of mRNA that forces your cells to produce this antibody, you are basically doing the same as if you only inject the antibody itself. Itcan fight off a covid infection for as long as this one "wave" of antibodies is active in your body.

What you need is an mRNA-sequence that forces your cells to produce something or a part of the original virus that makes your immune system react in such a way that it will produce this specific antibody on its own and "remeber the blueprint". Then you have an immunity.

If they can find out what part of the SAARS-virus led to this immune reaction in the original patient and this proves to be reproducible and safe in other patients, then we would have a vaccination.

The antibody itself is a great hope as a treatment for already infected patients and maybe even as a short time prevention for infection.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

This is super important to know. Getting the right sequence identified and reproduced correctly is an enormous task similar in scope to producing a nuclear weapon that actually, you know, works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I would add that successfully creating the vaccine is not enough. I mean, it has to be injected on a global scale, if not it keeps evolving into new variants, right? But even if there are enough shots available, they're still in the hands of corporations. And as we saw in the past two years, many poor countries didn't get enough to vaccinate even half of their people. Solving the problem doesn't give as much revenue as this scenario.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I must confess that I did not read the abstract of the new paper but the paper from last year said (IIRC) that the antibody in question attaches to a structure in Coronaviruses that, should it mutate to change it so that the antibody was no longer effective, the experts were qiite sure that as a result, the virus would no longer be infectous to humans.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

pretty sure all vaccines have side effects. still beats getting the disease

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There is no such thing as a medicine with no side effects. Never has been, never will be.