the Coronavirus outbreak thread

[12Relojes]

Originally Posted by uscmatt99

This is the most hopeful news yet. There will be a lot of people who survive this disease who would be able to help those who are struggling. This can be tested and scaled rapidly as opposed to novel meds or a vaccine, it's easy to test a donor, and (hopefully) easy to match to recipients. I look forward to the results of ongoing trials!

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.