Critique of the 2022 Nature Paper “Systemic and mucosal IgA responses are variably induced in response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination and are associated with protection against subsequent infection”
And a Call to Take Accountability and Admit Academic Misconduct
The article by Gommerman et al., published in Mucosal Immunology, a Nature journal, in 2022, has recently triggered some discussions. It was initially raised by Kirsch, who focused on one of the graphs in this article, and noted that these results, known already 2.5 years ago, strongly indicated waning immunity and even negative "protection" of the mRNA “vaccines.”
Kirsch also emphasized that the authors did not mention these devastating findings in their abstract. This is true. Notwithstanding this, I would like to raise another issue. The authors actually contradict themselves in various key points.
Below, I will identify some of those statements made by the authors that belie their own results. In recent years, such practices become a sad and increasingly common phenomenon. It’s now common knowledge that papers are only accepted when authors present their findings in a certain light. And, then, there are cases, as arguably done here, where authors radically contradict what their own data show. It is difficult to imagine they did not notice. It is less likely this was not picked up during the review and editorial process. I doubt it was due to language issues, either. At least one of the 40 (!) authors would have known better.
The data are out there, as can seen in this and other studies. Many of these publications are even freely accessible. Authors, reviewers, funders, and publishers must realize that the public is not illiterate. Some argue that many of the radical inconsistencies may be classified as fraud. I am calling on academia to acknowledge those grave issues and to end regulatory capture and the censorship of science.
Disparities in the paper by Gommerman and colleagues
As seen from the title, the authors are making strong claims about the “vaccines.” Their study purportedly revealed that “Systemic and mucosal IgA responses are variably induced in response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination and are associated with protection against subsequent infection.”
That’s quite a mouthful. Note the two “and” – both systemic and mucosal IgA responses evoked by the shots are triggered and are protective. How is this supported by their findings?
The Methods Used in the Study
This is in itself a critical issue. All the observations are based on an (in-house?) methodology that some of the authors used before. Studying the “Methods” section, in this case, leaves many open questions and fails to provide important details. By contrast, many of the key issues are delegated to their previous work. Based on that, the authors summarize their approach as follows (boldface added):
“We expressed the data as a percentage relative to a pooled sample of saliva from COVID-19 acute and convalescent patients—the same pooled sample was present in each plate. We previously found that this method provided excellent plate-to-plate consistency and produced similar results as what we found when we normalized to total IgG/IgA.”
The actual findings disprove the claims
The graphics below is Figure 1 from the article, with the colored emphasis mine. It does not show a rosy picture.
The yellow highlights indicate the measurements where even 2 shots are less effective than natural immunity (“COVID-19”)
Panels A and B are described in the article as follows: “levels of anti-Spike/RBD IgG were similar to or exceeded that of COVID-19 convalescent patients (Fig. 1A, B).” However, this is incorrect. If B is determined as higher (marked in blue), then A should, conversely, be recognized as “lower” rather than “similar.”
The orange highlights demonstrate that the shots do not offer hardly any improvement compared to the baseline. The latter is defined in terms of the study participants: subjects were examined before vaccination (“baseline”) and then after receiving 1 or 2 doses and measured at the indicated times.
The purple indicates where the shots have negative effects, as study participants were worse off than before they received the injections in terms of the immune response measured.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41385-022-00511-0#Sec9 (colored highlights are mine)
In terms of numbers and percentages, the above is specifically spelled out by Gommerman and coauthors:
“Focusing therefore on IgG and IgA responses, after two doses of mRNA vaccine 94% and 41% of participants were positive for anti-Spike IgG and IgA, and 93% and 20% of participants were positive for anti-RBD IgG and IgA Ab.”
Note that the IgA response is, via their own measurement, less than exciting. On the other hand, the initially (insanely) high IgG levels do not last, and, instead, radically diminish over time. The abstract puts it this way (emphasis added).
“Administration of a second dose of mRNA boosted the IgG but not the IgA response, with only 30% of participants remaining positive for IgA at this timepoint. At 6 months post-dose 2, these participants exhibited diminished anti-Spike/RBD IgG levels.”
Later in the text, the immune response evoked by the jabs is described as follows (emphasis mine):
“we observed robust IgG levels to Spike/RBD in the saliva of participants immunized with BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 that correlate with the systemic IgG response, and these IgG Ab are significantly diminished at 6 months post-dose 2.”
and
“Taken together, with the exception of Spike-specific SIgA, most Ab against SARS-CoV-2 in the saliva, as well as neutralizing capacity, significantly decline over a 6-month period.”
The extent of this significant decline is even more obvious when one considers Figure 3 in the article and the participants that were analyzed in this regard. Shockingly, the study did not even include all participants for this part. As noted by the authors (highlight added):
“We examined the level of salivary Ab only in those participants who had remained anti-Spike IgA positive at 2 weeks post-dose 2 (n = 32, ~30% of participants). Using a paired analysis, we observed a significant decline in antigen-specific IgG and IgA levels in the saliva at this time point compared to 2 weeks post-dose 2 (Fig. 3A–D).”
Figure 3 makes the above explicit, showing the overall decline that was acknowledged.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41385-022-00511-0#Sec9 (colored highlights are mine)
The only exception to the radical decline is seen in Fig. 3E, which involves the anti-Spike Ab associated with the secretory component. Interestingly, even though, as seen from Fig. 3E and F, the anti-RBD secretory component-associated antibodies were significantly reduced at 6 months post-dose 2, for both BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, Fig 3E depicts a uniquely different picture. At first glance, it is the only thing that could be regarded as positive, as opposed to the overall negative findings of the article. The authors describe it this way:
“although the neutralization activity of saliva at 6 months post-dose 2 was greatly diminished, anti-Spike SIgA levels had not significantly decayed at this time-point.”
Theoretically, the latter could be important. Let’s backtrack.
The study discovered a potential relationship between breakthrough infections and jab-based immune response that is worth noting. It identified that participants with breakthroughs had lower levels of vaccination-induced serum anti-Spike/RBD IgA at 2 weeks post-dose 2. This could indicate a protective effect of this component.
Given the above negative findings, the authors place great emphasis on this observation.
“although the SIgA response to Spike is lower than what is observed with SARS-CoV-2 infection, it is more resilient to decay. This preserved SIgA response observed in a minority of vaccinated participants may be very important for preventing breakthrough infections. Indeed, vaccinated participants who subsequently experienced a SARS-CoV-2 infection had significantly lower levels of anti-Spike serum IgA at 2–4 weeks post-dose 2 compared to subjects who remain uninfected.”
Even though this looks promising, the details are important:
The response is not only low. It is really low. Figure 2 shows that it is barely detectable even for anti-spike antibodies (it’s even lower for the anti-RBD Ab response). In this figure, the dotted black line (the highlight in green is mine) is the positive cutoff, calculated as 2 standard deviations above the mean of a pool of negative control samples.
The response is much lower than for natural infection (which is acknowledged by the authors).
Above, the authors also admit that the “preserved SIgA response” can be seen “in a minority of vaccinated participants.” What they mean by this is that after dose 2, it was maintained in only 30% of participants.
Finally, the clinical relevance and reproducibility of the maintained, albeit very low, SIgA levels post-vax are unclear.
The vaccine response was observed for salivary IgA.
The potentially protective effect, relative to breakthroughs, was seen for serum IgA. In this context, serum anti-Spike/RBD IgA was postulated to serve as a proxy of the salivary IgA response. A follow-up study is meant to examine corresponding saliva samples of breakthrough cases.
The study identified that 2-4 weeks post-dose 2, in participants who were subsequently infected with SARS-CoV-2, anti-Spike/RBD levels were lower for serum IgA but not IgG. This does not automatically prove the opposite, that higher salivary IgA levels are protective.
(cont.) Indeed, the authors admit that “the neutralization activity of saliva at 6 months post-dose 2 was greatly diminished.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41385-022-00511-0#Sec9 (the green highlights are mine)
Conclusion
The paper by Gommerman and colleagues is a good example of the culture of academic publications in recent years and demonstrates the type of results that are published.
The above has identified several issues.
Methods and Reproducibility: it will likely be difficult to reproduce the results as claimed. This is because of how the study was done.
The authors rely on their own method to compare differences in immune responses. Such a procedure is certainly not unique. Nonetheless, in cases where the entire analysis hinges on how differences between population groups and immune responses are measured, this could substantially impair the outcome.
The study itself is rather small, with some of the cohorts only involving 5, 11, or 12 participants.
Some of the most promising insights/observations regarding the saliva/serum IgAs as being protective are deferred to future studies.
Adding up their own findings, the paper concludes with the suggestion that future vaccination regiments should be through parenteral intramuscular priming followed by an intranasal boost. The success of such an approach is a hypothesis and has not been validated in the paper.
The paper indicates a potentially very important insight and suggests that serum anti-Spike/RBD IgAs may be associated with protection against subsequent breakthrough infection. However, what their paper shows is not what is highlighted by the authors.
The authors emphasize that, to facilitate protection, those levels need to be high. Yet, throughout, all their results show that related proxy levels, as induced by the vaccines, are extremely low.
It is known to the authors that anti-Spike SIgA levels may not be a solid measure for protection. They admit that “the neutralization activity of saliva at 6 months post-dose 2 was greatly diminished.”
At 6 months post shots, virtually no study has ever been able to demonstrate mRNA COVID-19 vaccine protection. Thus, the key discovery by Gommerman et al., that jab-induced “anti-Spike SIgA levels had not significantly decayed at this time-point,” does not validate the protective effect of the vaccines.
Overall, the key claims made by the authors are incorrect.
The title itself is highly incorrect: “Systemic and mucosal IgA responses are variably induced in response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination and are associated with protection against subsequent infection.” Indeed, for the jabs, almost all results in the study are negative. As admitted by the authors, the only potential exception is the observed salivary IgA response – which, however, in their study only applied to only 30% of participants where the corresponding SIgA counts, albeit, stable over 6 months, were very low.
In reality, the existing i.m. injections do not provide lasting immunity, even if the study revealed the jabs elicited a durable IgA response in the saliva.
The summary, “These data suggest that COVID-19 vaccines that elicit a durable IgA response may have utility in preventing infection” is not supported by the paper. It does not show that the existing vaccines have this property, and neither is it established why others would be able to do so.
Altogether, rather than showing the purported positive effect, the study indicates major problems with the vax-induced immune response. Some of the measures even indicate that the shots will impair previous immunity and engender negative “protection”.
Some may suggest the above provides sufficient reasons for the retraction of the article by Gommerman et al. However, apparently, this type of incorrect presentation of study data is a common phenomenon. I am calling on academics and institutions to provide a platform where independent researchers are free to openly discuss what they experienced during the Covid era, or possibly before, in terms of intimidation, harassment, and others when trying to publish raw data and honest results.
Amid the global call to combat mis-, dis- and malinformation, the above may be just one example to indicate the much more gigantic plight of regulatory capture and the censorship of science. Vested interest in science and publications ought to be admitted and dealt with. Scientific facts and findings must be published as they are. It is no longer be possible to sweep undesirable results under the proverbial rug. There is just too much evidence out there – even in the words of captured scientists themselves, however obscure these may be.