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Originally Posted by 12Relojes
Comments as a doctor.
1. If an infectious disease doctor or virologist refutes what I say, listen to them, not me.
2. Think of this as "borrowing" antibodies. You take blood from an exposed patient who now has antibodies but has cleared the virus. The idea being to augment your own antibody count.
3. It doesn't provide long lasting help. The antibodies you "borrow" don't help you make antibodies. Only exposure to the virus makes you make your own antibodies.
4. How you make a vaccine is by splitting the virus into pieces and taking a piece of it to see if it triggers an immune response, but not disease. This doesn't do that.
5. It therefore has no role in mass protection, it would only have a role in the treatment of the ill.
6. A vigorous immune response isn't always what we want. Our immune system can overshoot the mark, and frequently does. Think of asthma, anaphylaxis and just plain seasonal allergies where our immune system triggers an inappropriately aggressive response. These challenges are common in ICU medicine and one would be appropriately concerned that extra antibodies could just as easily make things worse.
7. We are better at identifying viruses than ever in the history of man. We are really good at identifying receptors that may provide a key to the structure of a vaccine. The rate-limiting step remains human testing. That's why they say 18 months at the earliest, bc everything is theory until you give it to human beings and see how they react and we don't know how to rush the human body.
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All excellent points. As a radiologist I only help to diagnose, I don't treat (yet!). It seems to me that this therapy could serve as a temporizing measure until a vaccine or better pharmaceutical agent is available. Theoretically if administered early on in the course of disease, it could decrease the overall viral load for patients and avert a cytokine storm and subsequent ARDS. Who knows, maybe it could be administered as a protective agent for frontline healthcare workers. Will certainly be easier to come by some plasma than PPE based on what I'm seeing in my neck of the woods. We will have to use all the tools in the toolkit for this one, and acquiring plasma is a definitely a much easier task than creating more beds, ventilators, and providers to staff them.