IgG4 Antibody Class Switch - Good News & Bad News

New study on a concerning topic

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

We had the discussion last December about seeing people who are constantly ill. I have been seeing the same thing recently and it seems to tie in with Covid waves.

Most of the people I see don’t get seriously ill but feel terrible for two to six weeks. Clearly something is up with people’s immune systems.

I am also hearing of more people than ever getting ill with things that definitely aren’t Covid. Problems with appendices, gall bladders, hearts, pancreases, as well as tumours, cancers, lesions and seizures. Fortunately, I don’t personally know anybody who has died suddenly but a lot of people are getting ill this year.

And, as usual, I may be biased but it does seem to be the vaccinated people that are getting ill. For example, I was at a party six weeks ago and almost everybody got ill afterwards. I could feel something was up for a couple of days but I didn’t have any symptoms, just slightly more tired than usual and then it disappeared. However, the people that I know who were vaccinated have been ill on and off for almost six weeks.

Their illness seems to come in waves. They have a couple of days where they feel like they are on the mend before some of their symptoms return and they feel rubbish again. None of their symptoms are life-threatening or even serious but the fact that it lasts for so long is concerning.

As speculated on previously, could this be due to a class switch towards spike protein-specific IgG4 antibodies?

IgG4, on the other hand, responds to allergens. If you get stung by a bee for example, your body might react with IgG3 or other antibodies and cause you to have an allergic reaction. To avoid this, your body learns how to recognise relatively insignificant foreign objects by switching to IgG4. Instead of increased inflammation to fight the foreign object, your immune system recognises that this is nothing major. Long term exposure, for example in bee keepers, produces this response. Immunotherapy also works this way by training your body with the foreign object you are allergic to until it is trained to produce an IgG4 response.

So this antibody class switch could mean that people’s immune systems are tolerating the Covid virus, in the same way as you do with pollen, instead of clearing it straight away. Normally, your body would detect the virus and produce the necessary responses to kill it off as quickly as possible. But with the antibody class switch, it is allowed to run amok, fatiguing the immune system and therefore allowing other illnesses to take hold.

The bad news is that a new study from Semmelweis University, Budapest confirms this. They found, as other studies have found, that vaccinated individuals produced this class switch to IgG4 antibodies.

The good news is that the proportion of IgG4 antibodies in people vaccinated with vector-based vaccines, e.g. AstraZeneca, was much lower. Furthermore, this class switch was not observed in people that were infected first and then got vaccinated.

So only people who received mRNA vaccines had higher levels of this specific type of antibody called IgG4, while those who received vector-based vaccines or had previously been infected did not.

This may explain why places like Sweden, despite being highly vaccinated, are not seeing as many excess deaths as places like the UK. Perhaps, because Sweden did not really lockdown, its citizens were infected with Covid before they were vaccinated. On the other hand, people in countries such as the UK, that had long lockdowns, only got infected after they had been injected.

Are people who were vaccinated with mRNA vaccines before they got infected with Covid, producing a higher proportion of IgG4 antibodies? When a new Covid wave comes along every three months or so, does this mean their bodies are tolerating the virus instead of clearing it, exhausting their immune systems? As a result, are these people susceptible to other illnesses or dormant viruses that there would have cleared instantly in the past? Are they suffering from constant illness as a result?

This is all empirical speculation based on real studies but somebody has to do it. Governments are ignoring the huge excess death rates and nobody seems to be concerned that half the country is constantly ill and off sick from work.

What have you been noticing?