This piece was written with the wonderful Dr. Andrea Love, who has an article out on the same problematic study from an immunological perspective. Check it out!
A new preprint study on COVID-19 vaccines has set the world afire. According to advocates for restrictions, the new data upholds long-standing beliefs that Long COVID causes permanent immune damage and is a terrifying force for the world. According to anti-vaccine advocates, such as the pandemic’s wrongest man, this preprint finally proves the idea that vaccine AIDS is a real disease coming for us all.
Fortunately for the globe, neither of these positions are reasonable or supported by the body of evidence. While every piece of data looking at COVID-19 vaccines is contentious, this new preprint contains minimal data, and doesn’t tell us much if anything about the potential issues that vaccines might cause.
There are certainly harms caused by COVID-19 vaccines. These are well-understood, and have been proven for years. Around 1 in 100,000 men and 1 in 1,000,000 women vaccinated with mRNA vaccines on their first course will experience myocarditis or pericarditis. A smaller number - around 1 in 1,000,000 people - will experience anaphylaxis. For viral vector vaccines such as Astrazeneca, there is around a 1 in 300,000 risk of a serious blood clotting issue. But despite the newest fears, there is no reason to believe that vaccines are destroying anyone’s immune system. The new study is scientifically inadequate, and cannot possibly tell us anything about health issues related to vaccination.
Let’s look at the data.
The Study
The new preprint is a cross-sectional case-control study. This is a type of study where you identify people based on their disease, and compare them to another group on possible risk factors to see if those might have caused the disease. It’s a handy type of research if you have a rare condition but know a lot about the people with that problem. It allows you to look at different things that the people with the disease might have in common. Crucially, though, you need an actual control group - we’ll come back to this.
The authors looked at a group of 42 people who had voluntarily signed up to the LISTEN (Listen to Immune, Symptom and Treatment Experiences Now) study with Yale university, and had said that they were suffering from long-term effects of COVID-19 vaccination.
This study was originally started to recruit people who had self-reported symptoms of long COVID to try to better understand the physiological features of the condition to see if there are ways to predict who might be at highest risk and how to manage lingering symptoms after acute illness.
These 42 people were compared to a control group of 22 people who were not experiencing long-term health issues who signed up to the same LISTEN study. They assessed various immunological parameters based on blood sample analysis (more on that in a minute!)
Akiko Iwasaki – well-known in the world of immunology and was the former President of the American Association for Immunology – shared some thoughts on this preprint in her Twitter feed, as she is listed as a senior author:
“Our study revealed differences in circulating immune cells, antibodies, EBV reactivation, and spike proteins in those with PVS. We accounted for SARS-CoV-2 infection status based on anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. Larger studies are needed to validate these findings”
But did this study actually do this? The short answer? Not at all.
The study measured a type of antibody called anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. Anti-N antibodies allow us to distinguish between infections and vaccination, because the vaccinations that we’ve developed don’t mimic the nucleocapsid part of the virus and so don’t cause people to make antibodies to it.
But the study did something very strange. A traditional cut-off value to determine whether someone has a positive test on an anti-N antibody test is 30ng/ml. It’s the one used by, for example, the Office for National Statistics in the UK. In the UK dataset, any test showing >30ng/ml is considered positive, meaning that the individual has previously had COVID-19.
In the new study, they used two ways to look at these antibodies. Firstly, they used a test kit manufactured by Roche that gives a positive/negative result. On this test, about 50% of the participants did not show a positive result for anti-N antibodies. But the authors also used an in-house test which measured the specific level of antibodies. On this in-house test, 94% of the people in the study (62/66 based on Figure 3D in the paper) had antibody levels that would usually be considered evidence of a past infection. This means that most of the people in the study probably had already had a COVID-19 infection when they had these tests run.
If you look at the dates these samples were taken - end 2022 to early 2023 - this makes a lot of sense. By March 2022, it’s likely that close to 100% of people globally had had at least one infection due to the Omicron surge. It would be remarkably unlikely to find that 50% of any sample had never had COVID by the end of 2022.
So most of the sample had already had COVID-19. This means that any issues noticed by the authors could easily be due to Long COVID rather than vaccinations.
What about the symptomatic people vs the control? The authors found that there were a number of fairly minor differences between the groups in terms of their results on tests of their immune systems. For example, people with long-term symptoms had higher levels of antibodies against COVID-19, which might indicate that they had more recent infections than the people in the control group.
There were also a number of changes which have been wildly overstated by disingenuous charlatans online. The authors of the study tested a range of T-cell responses. These are a type of immune cell that help defend your body against infection. One useful measure of T-cell activity is how many cells are “exhausted”. This measure is used as an indicator in HIV treatment, because there’s some evidence that a higher number of exhausted T-cells means that the total count of T-cells will start falling soon as well.
The authors of the study found that people with long-term symptoms had more of one type of ‘exhausted’ T-cells, but not another. The difference was statistically significant, but it’s also not really meaningful. If you look at the graphs in the paper, the median number of ‘exhausted’ T-cells for both the symptomatic and control groups was at or just above zero - the graphs are a bit low-res so it’s hard to tell the exact number. There were only 8 people in total in the symptomatic group who had an exhausted T-cell count that was noticeably higher than the median. There’s also some question raised by immunologists on Bluesky as to whether these are really measures of exhausted cells.
Looking at the actual data here, there really doesn’t seem to be much difference between the groups. Yes, there’s a few statistically significant results, but they aren’t particularly meaningful. In addition, some of the stuff that’s gone the most viral about this study - such as the idea that the vaccines might be related to Epstein-Barr virus reactivation - weren’t even different between the groups!
The study also fundamentally could not tell us anything about whether vaccines cause health issues. Why? Every single person in the study had been vaccinated. Including the controls. Most of the people in both groups had also had at least one SARS-CoV-2 infection according to their antibodies. Virtually the entire group had evidence of an Epstein-Barr infection, even the controls. So this paper cannot possibly give us any information about whether the vaccine or infection has caused any issues at all. There’s simply no way to make any inference about causality when everyone has the same exposure.
In addition, this was a tiny piece of research. Far too few people to help us understand anything interesting about health issues and where they come from. There is an entire scientific discipline dedicated to trying to identify causal relationships between health problems and exposures, and it’s far more difficult than a terrible online survey and some antibody tests. This was a one-arm study looking at 100% vaccinated people that somehow concluded that vaccines were causing problems for some of them.
There are many other weaknesses to this paper. There’s a huge issue with recall bias, for example. Most of the people in the symptomatic group had had their vaccines well over a year before they were interviewed for the research. This makes their statements about what might be causing their symptoms to be very unreliable - not because they are dishonest, but because people are terrible at remembering things.
But there’s no need to go through every major concern, because the study simply could not tell us anything about vaccines regardless.
It’s possible that COVID-19 vaccinations have some extraordinarily rare health impacts that we haven’t yet found, but frankly we doubt it. Yes, there are negatives to vaccination, but the idea that vaccines are causing an AIDS-like problem is a basic misreading of an already-weak piece of research.
If you’ve been vaccinated, there’s no need whatsoever to worry about your immune system. Vaccines are, in fact, the best way to make sure that your immunity against disease remains strong.
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