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

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

  • r_wraith@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    392·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Weirdmusic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      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.

    • hopelessbyanxiety@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • r_wraith@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        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.