Early Indications of ADE in UK Data?
Recent data may signal the beginning of Antibody-dependent Enhancement...
Early on in the vaccination endeavor last spring, if you knew where to look, you could find voices raising concerns over the risk of Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE) or Vaccine Associated Disease Enhancement (VADE) from the COVID shots. The idea is that after developing an initial immune response (especially through vaccination), exposure to the live virus “in the wild” can bring on an “overreactive” immune response, leading to death by one’s own immune system.
The reason for this concern was well-founded. Vaccines for respiratory viruses had been attempted a number of times in the past (RSV, SARS), had all resulted in V/ADE in the animal trials.
While COVID shot skeptics have been worrying about this possibility from the mass jabbing campaign, there hasn’t been much clear evidence for ADE . . . yet.
The most recent UKHSA report when compared to the reports over the past few months may be the initial tendril of smoke wafting out of the proverbial smoking gun.
It’s only a hint so far, but it comes when comparing Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for those under 50 over the past few months. CFR is calculated by dividing the number of deaths in a given period by the number of diagnosed cases of a disease (gratefully this is usually lower than Infection Fatality Rate [IFR] since asymptomatic and mild cases are often undiagnosed). So if you have 100 cases in a month and 3 deaths, your CFR is 3% (3/100), meaning that 3% of cases end in death.
Here’s the graph for <50 year old CFR in the UK over the past few months:
Notice the end there that is circled. Now it may be too early to declare this as proof of ADE, so we’ll have to keep an eye on it. But at the moment, this recent trend is unlike all previous weeks.
In past weeks the unvaccinated CFR has usually been higher than fully vaxxed CFR (except for a period in July and October probably due in part to reporting lags). Furthermore, previously the CFR of both categories has moved in roughly the same pattern.
Here we’re seeing something different. Since the beginning of January the CFR of both partly and fully vaxxed has been trending upward while the CFR of unvaxxed has been trending downward. As of this most recent report, the CFR for unvaxxed stands at 0.012% vs. fully vaxxed at 0.014%.
Of course this could change in the coming weeks - the trend line for unvaxxed does seem to be bending a bit and may turn up in the weeks ahead.
On the other hand, this could be the earliest indications of dreaded ADE. Only time will tell.
We’ll keep you posted here, at Nelson’s News. ‘(:::)