Friday, April 11, 2025

Another mRNA disease vaccine: The RSV problem

 

Wikipedia on RSV in adults and the use of vaccines:

 Very nasty virus infection in kids.

Some of these kids who got very sick ended up living in our office with one infection after another until they hit three or four years old and then they got over it.

But adults? Likd Dr. C I have not gotten infected from these kids. 

and I seem to remember them having an RSV vaccine years ago: LINK

In 1966, the first vaccine for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), a formalin-inactivated RSV vaccine, was administered to U.S. infants and children participating in four clinical trials. The vaccinated children were subsequently exposed to RSV in the community and those who had no antibodies against RSV infection prior to vaccination experienced more frequent and severe RSV infection, a condition known as enhanced respiratory disease.

As a result of the failed vaccine and harms caused to those who received this experimental vaccine, development of further vaccines to prevent RSV infection stalled for several decades.

the article from 2015 reviews the same history

and explains why this happened:

Decades of research defined enhanced RSV disease (ERD) as the result of immunization with antigens not processed in the cytoplasm, resulting in a nonprotective antibody response and CD4+ T helper priming in the absence of cytotoxic T lymphocytes. This response to vaccination led to a pathogenic Th2 memory response with eosinophil and immune complex deposition in the lungs after RSV infection....

 italics mine.

enhanced T cells, hyper immune response, maybe even made worse because they used formaldahyde to kill the virus?

I will have to read the whole thing, but my problem is that this immune stuff was not known when I studied in medical school

and the problem seems to be similar to the enhanced immunity for the dengue vacccine if given to those who never had dengue: 

Two mysterious observations defied our understanding of ERD susceptibility for decades: ERD never occurred in those infants who were seropositive for RSV at the time of FIRSV administration, and no child ever experienced ERD twice (26).  
The answer to these two enigmas also explains why FIRSV elicited antibodies that failed to protect against RSV infection (26).
The mechanism responsible for the absence of a protective antibody response against RSV remained unclear for decades, hampering the development of new vaccines against the virus.,,,,

 

In summary, vaccines eliciting nonneutralizing antibody against RSV in seronegative individuals may prime for ERD and should not be administered to infants (at least until effective nonneutralizing mechanisms of antibody-mediated protection are demonstrated).

 which is what we saw with the Dengue vaccine: Enhanced disease if you gave the shot to kids who never had Dengue.

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