By Dr. Beda M. Stadler, emeritus professor of immunology and former director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Bern.
The corona virus gradually disappears.
What has actually happened in the past few weeks? The experts have overlooked fundamental connections. The immune response to the virus is much stronger than you thought.
Interview of Prof. Stadler about this, in English:
This is not an indictment, but an unsparing record. I could slap myself because I had been looking at the SARS-Cov-2 virus with panic on the neck for far too long. I am also a little annoyed by many of my immunologist colleagues who have so far left the discussion about Covid-19 to virologists and epidemiologists. It seems to me that it is time to publicly criticize some of the main and completely wrong statements about this virus.
First, it was wrong to say that the virus was new. Second, it was even more wrong to claim that the population had no immunity to this virus.Third, it was, so to speak, the culmination of stupidity to claim that you could go through Covid-19 disease without symptoms or infect others without symptoms.
The story of the lack of immunity
From the World Health Organization (WHO) to Facebook virologists, everyone has claimed that the virus is particularly dangerous because there is no immunity to it because it is a new virus. Even Anthony Fauci, the Trump administration’s primary advisor, initially said in public appearances that the virus was at risk of lack of immunity. Back then, Tony and I often sat side by side in immunology seminars at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda in the United States because we were working in related fields at the time. So for a while I was pretty uncritical of what he said, after all it came from a respectable colleague.
The penny didn’t really come to my mind until I realized that the first commercial antibody test was an old antibody that actually recognized SARS. This type of test looks to see if there are any antibodies in the blood that were created in a previous fight against the virus. Antibodies were also isolated from a llama which recognize SARS, SARS-Cov-2 and MERS in equal measure. It was also known that in China, where SARS had raged, SARS-Cov-2 did less harm. These are clear findings that necessarily suggest that our immune system considers at least SARS and SARS-Cov-2 to be partially identical and that one virus could probably protect us from the other.
I realized then that the whole world was simply claiming that there was no immunity, but in reality no one had a test to prove such a claim. It wasn’t science, it was just a gut feeling speculation that was parroted by everyone. To date there are no antibody tests that describe all the different possible immunological situations, such as: whether you have been immune, since when, against which the neutralizing antibodies are directed and how many structures exist on other corona viruses that also contribute to immunity to lead.
In mid-April a work from the group of Andreas Thiel from the Charité in Berlin was published. It was a work with thirty authors, including the virologist Christian Drosten. It showed that 34 percent of Berliners who had never had contact with the SARS-Cov-2 virus were still able to detect T cell immunity (another type of immune response, see below). This means that our T cells, i.e. white blood cells, recognize common structures on SARS-Cov-2 and the normal cold viruses and thus fight both.
A study by John PA Ioannidis at Stanford University, one of the ten most cited scientists in the world according to the Einstein Foundation in Berlin, also showed that immunity to SARS-Cov-2, measured with antibodies, is significantly higher than previously thought . Ioannidis is certainly not a conspiracy theorist who just goes against the tide, but he is now criticized because no really precise antibody tests have been used. The critics admit that they also have no such tests. Incidentally, John PA Ioannidis is such a scientific heavyweight that all German virologists, taken together, are lightweight.
(Taken for the English translation of the original article in German)
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/corona_aufarbeitung_warum_alle_falsch_lagen