Re:Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in...
by croutonwagon on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @09:46PM
(#23993466)
Isn’t that the entire point of vaccines though. To essentially give a small amount of exposure to your immune system so that it
A) knows how to deal with the pathogen specifically
B) doesn’t go wild and kill the host in its own right whilst trying to figure out how to properly deal with the pathogen
My understanding is that without exposure you body kinda throws a lot of different types of t-cells at the issue. Once it kinda knows how to handle it, it just throws the specific variant of t-cells needed.
For example, in the 1918 flu pandemic, research has indicated the the immune response that it provoked was one of the reasons it was so deadly[0].
With SARS-COV-2 one of the treatments that has studies that show reduction in mortality is dexamethasone which is a steroid that reduces the inflammatory response (which is an immune response)[1].
So it is not unreasonable to think that an immune system modulating drug may help with SARS-COV-2. Whether or not hydroxychloroquinine specifically does is a different story, but it would not be surprising for something in this class to have a beneficial effect.
0. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060927201707.h...
1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021436