Claims About Antibody-Dependent Enhancement and the Pfizer Vaccine

suddenly see this kind of frantic scramble.

This is precisely what one would see

if antibody dependent enhancement was happening.

What is antibody dependent enhancement?

Briefly, it's that the vaccine causes

the virus to become more infectious

than would happen in the absence of vaccination,

would cause the virus to replicate at higher levels

than in the absence of infection.

This is the vaccinologist's worst nightmare.

It happened with the respiratory syncytial virus

in the 60s and caused more child deaths in vaccine recipients

than unvaccinated.

It happened with Dengvaxio, the dengue vaccine,

and it's happened with virtually every other coronavirus vaccine development program,

certainly in humans known in history,

and it's what the vaccinologists like myself have been warning about

since the outset is the risk of antibody dependent enhancement.

Why would it first show up in Pfizer?

Pfizer actually probably, we don't actually have the data,

but from first principles,

the Pfizer dose is about a third of the Moderna dose,

and it's likely as an RNA vaccine to express much less spike

for a shorter period of time than

you see with a recombinant adenoviral vector vaccine like Johnson & Johnson.

So, we now know that the Pfizer protection is waning at six months,

and what the data seem to suggest is those have received Pfizer,

which is probably the least immunogenic of the three in terms of durability,

length of protection,

people that are now in the waning phase of the immune response

to the Pfizer vaccine seem to be getting infected.

Notice they keep talking about Pfizer and not about the other two.

So, this suggests,

this is exactly what you would anticipate

is the window of greatest susceptibility to antibody dependent enhancement

is in this long tapering phase.