Immune changes from repeated mRNA jabs are linked to a higher risk of Covid

A new paper finds more shots equals more IgG4 antibodies and more Covid cases! That's how vaccines are supposed to work, right?

The bestest vaccines ever keep getting bester.

In late 2022, German researchers published a shocking report: repeated mRNA Covid shots from Pfizer and Moderna made people produce more of what are called IgG4 antibodies, a change that might hurt the immune system’s ability to fight Covid.

Now Spanish scientists have shown the risk is real, reporting that mRNA-jabbed people with high levels of IgG4 antibodies are more likely to get Covid over and over.

The Spanish study, published last week, backs the anecdotal evidence of frequent Covid infections in people who have received repeated mRNA boosters. And it again raises the question if the mRNAs have caused long-term immune system damage.

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(Five years in. Still on the wall. Stand with me, for less than 20 cents a day.)

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The Spanish researchers published their new findings last week in the peer-reviewed Journal of Infection, drawing on healthcare workers around Barcelona they began following in 2020, even before Covid vaccines were available.

They found that people with higher levels of IgG4 antibodies were 80 percent more likely than those with lower levels to become infected with Covid over a six-month period. The association had a lower bound of 1.2 — a fancy way of saying it almost certainly was not due to chance.

“These findings suggest a potential association between IgG4 induction by mRNA vaccination and a higher risk of breakthrough infection,” the researchers wrote, adding that the results “may necessitate reevaluation of vaccine formulations or booster schedules.”

The scientists were too polite to add that knowing about the potential problems before giving mRNA jabs to over one billion people worldwide would have been nice.

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(Mo shots, mo problems…)

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The study’s results are robust because of its length, the variety of data the researchers collected, the fact that healthcare workers are generally conscientious about tracking and reporting infections, and its size. Even after excluding recipients who had failed to get a booster or missed visits, the researchers had almost 200 people to track.

Antibodies are the immune system’s front line of defense against infection. They attach to surface proteins on viruses and bacteria to prevent them from entering cells and trigger deadly immune attacks. Immune cells called B-cells make them in response to infection, and they come in several classes, with IgG the most common.

But not all IgG antibodies are the same. They come in four primary subclasses, called IgG1 through IgG4.

Of those, IgG1 is nearly always the most frequent, while IgG3 is generally the deadliest to “antigens” — the viruses and bacteria that attack our bodies. IgG2 and IgG4 do not engage the rest of the immune system the same way as IgG1 and IgG3.

IgG4 antibodies are especially rare.

The body appears to make them mostly in response to prolonged and repeated antigen exposure, as a way to tamp down the immune response. One classic example comes from studies beekeepers, who have been found to make IgG4 antibodies to bee venom as a way to avoid an allergic reaction if they are stung.

Other types of vaccines do not generally produce this IgG4 response, and scientists have not yet determined exactly why the mRNAs do. One possible response is that prolonged production of the coronavirus spike protein, which researchers at Yale have found in people who received the mRNAs for up to two years, is somehow causing the switch.

But neither Pfizer nor Moderna have shown much interest in examining the issue, or other potential problems with the Covid shots and mRNA biotechnology. Under the Biden Administration, researchers at the National Institutes of Health weren’t either.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford University epidemiologist and Covid lockdown skeptic who was approved on Tuesday to run the NIH, now has the opportunity to change that.

Over to you, Jay!

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Original December 2022 article about the IgG4 class switch: