Day 107: Jab the Children

As predicted, Russia made its move to #2 today with 281,000 cases, outnumbering Spain's by any accounting. Canada at 77,000 is the next up to surpass China. The US is at 1.5 million cases and almost 91,000 deaths. Here in Massachusetts we're up 1%, and surprisingly, California at 80,000 cases is looking like a contender to catch up to our 86,000 cases and push us back down to #5, a spot we haven't seen in a long time.

A more general take on the measles theory from yesterday (and previous days) as well as its big brother the BCG theory, is that live vaccines of all sorts are generally protective against other diseases. One pro-MMR preprint suggests using MMR boosters to encourage the immune system to fight coronavirus:

We reason that children are protected against viral infections that induce sepsis because of more recent and frequent exposure to live attenuated vaccines (MMR, rotovirus, smallpox, chickenpox, BCG), which induce suppressive MDSCs [myeloid-derived suppressor cells] that limit inflammation and sepsis.

Strangely they don't mention MMRV (the newest thing in MMRs is to toss in some chickenpox along with the traditional measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations), perhaps because neither a schedule nor a perceived need for boosting varicella immunity exists as of yet.

A letter to the editor of the International Journal of School Health last month also speculated on the protective powers of childhood vaccination, though they did not feel that the spike proteins of coronavirus and rubella (among others) were similar enough for a direct effect:

This [lack of similarity] suggests that memory T-cells, rather than vaccine neutralizing antibodies, may be involved in the protection of children against COVID-19. This is because children have a larger number of naive T-cells that can be programmed to protect them against the disease. This is consistent with a study in which the levels of SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies correlated with age among 175 COVID-19 recovered patients. Elderly and middle-aged subjects developed higher levels of antibodies and lower blood lymphocyte counts compared to the younger patients. Meanwhile, no SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies were detected in 6% of those younger than 40.

PlagueBlog found the recent spate of vaccine-related paper on Reddit, mostly thanks to user D-R-AZ. In the various discussion on Reddit it came up that infants under a year do not normally receive the MMR(V), and infants have also proven far more susceptible to COVID-19 than other young children (although, PlagueBlog must mention despite the taboo, such infant cases are still far rarer and far less dangerous than the flu).