What do you mean by “immune erosion”? Is this different than “immune evasion” and “immune escape”? I can’t find any explanation on google—is this a standard term?
Existing mRNA vaccines theoretically provide antibodies to about 42 epitopes of the original spike protein. So, they are very effective against the original strain as any one of these antibodies would be neutralizing.
Let’s say for example that only 10 out of 42 are neutralizing for omicron. That means that many people will be unlucky and not produce enough of the right antibodies to stop the omicron at first, thus their protection has eroded. But some will be lucky enough to produce the necessary amount of the right antibodies. So the protection was not completely bypassed.
Per my understanding “immune evasion” and “immune escape” imply a binary, i.e. previous immunity has no effect. “Immune erosion” is a more intuitive way of describing how this variant likely interacts with protection from previous infection or vaccination, with protection against infection, hospitalization, death “eroding” to a degree but not being completely negated.
What do you mean by “immune erosion”? Is this different than “immune evasion” and “immune escape”? I can’t find any explanation on google—is this a standard term?
Immune erosion is used to make people understand that immune escape is only partial and not total
Existing mRNA vaccines theoretically provide antibodies to about 42 epitopes of the original spike protein. So, they are very effective against the original strain as any one of these antibodies would be neutralizing.
Let’s say for example that only 10 out of 42 are neutralizing for omicron. That means that many people will be unlucky and not produce enough of the right antibodies to stop the omicron at first, thus their protection has eroded. But some will be lucky enough to produce the necessary amount of the right antibodies. So the protection was not completely bypassed.
Per my understanding “immune evasion” and “immune escape” imply a binary, i.e. previous immunity has no effect. “Immune erosion” is a more intuitive way of describing how this variant likely interacts with protection from previous infection or vaccination, with protection against infection, hospitalization, death “eroding” to a degree but not being completely negated.
I believe I first saw it in this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/kakape/status/1428657737190322184?s=20