Post #1986542

2026-04-29 05:59 UTC

@datum 🙏 …and thanks to Nitter for the double gloved ability to dig through the posts of those who remained over there. The most Ab-evasive variant will preferentially infect those w/stronger Ab immunity. That was a real "aha!" moment for me, as of course the poor old kids in classrooms have had more chances to develop antibodies than anyone else, and they got hit hard and often early in the pandemic, so may have imprinted on those While my attention span holds, I'm just digging through old stuff, antigenic cartography for BA.3.2. BA.3.2 is off on its own, a long way from those early variants, so the classroom derived antibodies aren't so relevant to defending against it. Whereas adults who may have kept up with boosters, or not so many infections early on, may be better prepared. (As in that JN.1 derived cluster is a lot closer to BA.3.2, although not that close.) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.30.651462v1.full.pdf

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@datum@zeroes.ca 2026-04-29 15:44

@mediaevalfishsandwich Still hunting for that stronger "like" than "like" for "thank you that was very informative": that's a great paper!! RBD-ACE2 binding affinity ... BA.3.2 exhibits disastrously low fitness compared to LP.8.1.1 and in human plasma in human plasma, BA.3.2 also demonstrated profound humoral immune evasion, with an 11-fold reduction in geometric mean neutralizing titer (NT50) compared to BA.3 and re: what the smarties in the xcancel thread were saying about China's different immune landscape: Class 1/4 antibodies are prevalent in Chinese populations immunized with inactivated vaccines, where immune imprinting is less pronounced In contrast, mRNA vaccine recipients with stronger immune imprinting rarely develop these antibodies, which may cause divergent neutralization responses against BA.3.2 between these groups. Figure 3 of that paper, too - very informative! #COVID #COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #BA32 #immunology

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