What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity? [Anthony Leonardi has been consistently right] | Andrew Nikiforuk

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/11/07/COVID-Reinfections-And-Immunity/

Highlights:

• "But what if COVID wears down T cells in people who get it, and does so increasingly with each reinfection? That concern lies at the heart of a rolling, rancorous scientific debate, a lot of it conducted on Twitter. A person at the centre of the storm, sounding alarms about T cell “dysregulation” since the early days of the pandemic, has been a U.S. immunologist named Anthony Leonardi."
• "By dysregulation Leonardi means three effects of COVID:
  • The hyperactivation of many T cells, which can prematurely age them
  • The exuberant function of those hyperactivated T cells, which can then cause organ damage
  • The exhaustion of those hyperactivated T cells, which implies they aren’t winning the battle against viral proteins they are supposed to defeat."
• Leonardi’s track record—he has been right on all these things:
  • Immunity and exhausted T cells—“Leonardi warned that the virus undermined and aged the immune system by hyperactivating and exhausting T cells. This overstimulation could in turn damage organs including the heart, brain and the kidneys… the virus damages T cells so severely that COVID not only undermines the immune response for COVID but perhaps other pathogens as well.”
  • Vulnerability related to age—“He predicted that the pandemic would reduce life expectancy around the world, most harming people aged 50 and over” “Leonardi reasoned that COVID caused more death than flu, and he noted that the immune system performed at its peak when people are in their 30s declined when people entered their 50s. COVID’s impact on the elderly was worrisome, he noted in 2020, “because as we age, we don’t produce many, if any, T cells… You can’t turn the clock back on T cells. Too many challenges, and they exhaust and senesce. Not to mention, the virus will mutate and escape without vaccines.””
  • The ‘Leonardi Effect’ for other pathogens—SARS2 impairs the immune system’s ability to fight pathogens in general/immune suppression “He hypothesized that the virus, by harming the immune system, could make people more vulnerable to other infections and cancers”
  • Repeated reinfections—reinfections add to the damage and probably “prime their body to only recall existing immune memory and mount poor immune responses to new variants”
  • Suffer the children—“he argued that exposing children repeatedly to a virus that impairs the immune system and causes vascular disease and brain shrinkage was bad policy“
  • Herd immunity—there isn’t any

On SARS2/COVID-induced immune suppression and greater vulnerability to infectious disease: