Maybe this type of bispecific antibodies could be used to neutralize the spike protein which the body produces through the vaccine. As far as I understand the targeted deltoid muscle is a cell with a long life therefore procuding and releasing spikes for a yet unkown timeframe. Given the various specific boosters I can imagine one taking neutralizing antibodies to avoid a constant immune system stimulation.

The vaccine's longer-term effectiveness comes from the immune system's memory B cells response to the short-lived expression of spike proteins.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_RNA#Degradation

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/19/immune-markers-post-vaccina...

A vaccine causes the patient to develop specific immunity (fast reaction to a specific antigen) by introducing (usually injecting) a large amount of an antigen. That prompts the immune system to react by developing B-cells that produce their own antibodies to the antigen. It turns the body into its own antibody factory to deal with whatever you injected, but that takes time.

Injecting antibodies, as in this study, bypasses the natural (slow) specific immunity generation process. Antibodies are created some other way (in a lab, or in some other animal) and then directly injected. It's done for serious diseases or dangerous toxins or immuno-compromised individuals, when waiting for the patient to develop their own specific immunity is too slow or dangerous.

Critically, a vaccine allows the body to maintain the ability to fight off similar-enough infections for a while, but usually takes weeks or more to reach near full effect, sometimes requiring multiple shots for better effectiveness. If you're trying to treat an infection you think you might already have or will get in the next few days, vaccines only work if the progression of the disease is very slow, as in rabies which takes something like 1-2 months to make it into the CNS.

Injecting antibodies is a one-shot treatment that must be repeated until the virus (or toxin or other bad thing) is gone. It's commonly done for toxins (spider or snake venoms), or sometimes for severe diseases (ebola, tetanus), but sars-cov-2 has so much attention that now they're doing it for that too. In patients who aren't immunocompromised, antibody treatments for less-lethal infections give their immune systems more time to generate their own antibodies without developing severe symptoms.

The similarity in the two approaches is that they both ultimately involve antibodies binding to coronavirus proteins. The difference is in where those antibodies come from, and whether the body can produce more at will (vaccine --[time]--> natural immunity), or whether you have to keep injecting them (antibody treatments).

That's only a rough approximation. The immune system is very complicated. Wikipedia, or a book on molecular biology or immunology, will go into a lot more detail.

I'd say it's worth exploring on those grounds alone. Anything to keep health and vital service staff functional during the bad times.

Getting treated with antibodies don't mean you're asymptomatic or that you'll feel well. It only means you'll have less severe symptoms. You'd have healthcare workers walking around sick, spreading the very disease they're trying to treat others for. Or taking up a hospital or clinic bed, not treating patients, using up limited healthcare resources — which, for the duration of their illness, is a worse outcome for their patients than if the healthcare workers weren't there at all.

It's expensive. There's no economy of scale for an unusual disease outbreak. That applies to both antibody and vaccine stockpiles.

If the disease is minor (like COVID-19 usually is for otherwise healthy individuals), healthcare workers might be willing to take a chance to avoid the hassle of PPE, but would their employer (such as a hospital, or MSF)? They're the ones who have to pay for antibody treatment if their healthcare employees get sick. They're the ones who have medical ethicists looking out for both the well-being of the frontline healthcare workers and patients.

If the disease has a significant mortality rate, availability of a specific antibody treatment, even if it's stocked and instantly available, wouldn't motivate anyone to go without PPE. Nor would getting vaccinated. They're not guarantees of survival, and preventing healthcare workers from getting sick is more important than treating patients.

Agreed. If you don't have respiratory, skin, or sensory-processing issues that make it a big deal, it's not a big deal.

Given the "breaking the skin" comment, I wonder if PP is thinking of clear plastic face shields which protect against spatter, but not aerosols.

New mutations (since some chronic, immunocompromised unable to clean the infection patient will get it).

Probably eventually, yeah. Assuming all goes well with further research and development.

"In conclusion, NTD-RBD bsAbs offer promising potential for the design of resilient, next-generation antibody therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 VOCs."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8647783/ search "N-Terminal"

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...

[2] Just to be clear: I have no opinion on this research, nor am I suggesting that it is wasteful. I'm just pointing out that the entire meme of "Trump confused transgenic har har har" is factually incorrect, and also deeply ironic.

> The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).

They are striving to be role models, and they are role models for their followers, and this is clearly visible in changea in social interactions...

Even when I disagreed with some of what he did (and didn't do), I absolutely can't recall a single time that I didn't admire the manner in which Obama spoke and behaved.

You generally don’t hear someone screaming “with all due respect I must disagree” before shooting someone.

* find an expert who has apparently superior knowledge about a widespread problem afflicting his people

* immediately seek guidance from that expert and conscript him into solving that problem

* apply that guidance by directing resources to test the theory experimentally

* begin to hold that expert accountable when their experiment fails to follow that expert's predictions

* Stop seeking accountability and reverse course when it does produce results (despite this process being very public), and offer the expert the job of fixing more things.

Could you ask for more? Do you think the current democratic discourse is above or below this level?

Or non-democratic discourse for that matter. How did we deal with Lysenko's theories on crop yields?

*Some* of the studies were about the potential physiological effects of hormone therapy. They used mice, but the point was to study how humans are affected by HRT.

The way the article is written makes it sound like they're putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns.

-"The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it"

-Scientists weren't actually "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."

-Trump confused transgenic mice with transgender mice

The word he used was transgender, and the studies were all for transgender health in a mouse model.

Critics are the ones bringing transgenic into the conversation, which neither matches what he said, or the majority of the studies.

It is as if Bob called the ocean blue, but Sally claims Bob really meant red, while simultaneously pointing out he is wrong because the ocean actually blue. It is a really weak criticism.

A more coherent response is simply: "Studying transgender health in mouse models is important, and those studies were a good use of money"

You have to be careful there. Plenty of individual animals in the wild exhibit social behaviors that we would associate with unconventional gender roles if they were humans. There are known evolution-based rationales for many if not most of these behaviors, and it's safe to say there are unknown evolution-based rationales for the rest.

We're not special.

Also conventional gender roles change over time, and vary by culture, because gender is performance. It used to be conventional for men to wear high heels and makeup and kiss each other on the mouth, and sexual relationships between men weren't always considered transgressive of masculine norms.

I spent most of my childhood believing that homosexuality was unnatural, inherently sinful, and entirely unique to humans, because that's the spiel that the local Southern Baptist preachers were selling. The same is true for things we call "gender roles." Some male animals act in ways we once reflexively associated with females of their species, and vice versa.

I'll edit the comment to remove the reference to homosexuality, though, because that point wasn't especially clear or useful.

Any remotely sane administration, faced with something similar, would just put out a statement about how a speechwriter made a mistake, the intent was different than the exact wording used by the President, and let it go.

Instead, various lackeys are left to performatively scramble and media outlets are under pressure, all to find some twisted interpretation under which he can retroactively have been right all along. Madness reminiscent of Orwell's writing. It makes you wonder, happens if he says "pi is 3"?

For those people, it is the left that is twisting the words and factually incorrect ( e.g. Trump did not mix up transgender and transgenic).

Using poetic or lose language is rhetorical style that trump has employed since the first term. Trump keeps doing it because the feeble response makes it a winning tactic.

For many people, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are "The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it" or scientists weren't "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."

this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results.

of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”

so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point.

if you read the abstract that they link to [0]:

> Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung

asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue.

if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist

> and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women

but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can:

> In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol

if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with.

so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones.

if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible.

now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements.

0: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526

1. X says that A did stupid thing B!

2. Y makes fun of X because obviously A didn't do stupid thing B.

3. Z (that's you) points out that A did a thing B', that is like B, only not stupid, but technically X described it accurately if tendentiously.

How do you deal with that? I don't think the human political brain is built for this level of indirection. But realistically this will now always be a fight between X's and Y's faction, because Z's position, though true, is too complicated to fit in a soundbite.

I don't know how we get back from that. If it were truth vs lies it would be manageable, but the truth isn't even on the table because it's too big to fit into the argumentative paradigm.

Historically, with a slap, either open handed or with a glove to induce a dual. But we live in more genial times where such egregious violence is deemed unavailable.

> I don't think the human political brain is built for this level of indirection.

Indeed. People using incompetent and mistaken assumptions doesn't improve on their desire to tear up the political foundations in the US.

It was not "technically described accurately" tho. It was a lie and comment you are responding to makes that clear.

So I think that response to that tactic would be to simply call it a lie rather then "technically accurate".

edit: Nevermind I retract this. I think you're right about this paper in particular. I guess it comes down to whether a study involving weird things with gender hormones is "about gender"? But it still seems like the core debate is ultimately not very much attached to actual reality.

edit: It's like the "chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay" Alex Jones meme - if you thought "no that's nonsense there were no chemicals in the water" you would know less about Atrazine than Alex Jones did, despite Alex Jones also being wrong about what's going on with the frogs. The way in which you think that someone is wrong can also be wrong, even if that someone is in fact wrong.

Atrazine is causing hermaphroditic frogs, chemically castrating them, and turning male frogs into behavioral females.

Trump often plays in a similar gray zone (e.g. dual meaning, hyperbole, simplification) with language because It is often a winning tactic.

Trump and Jones generate soundbites that cant be easily refuted with democratic soundbites. Overly simplistic rebuttals often end up even less accurate and more detached from reality.

I have given some thought to why this is, and I think it is for a few reasons. First, I think that democratic respondents don't share as much linguistic & conceptual framework with the target audience (e.g. a feminized male frog = a gay frog).

Second, and relatedly, I think rebuttals are afraid to engage with certain topics, and therefore end up tying themselves up in knots.

Last, is they have an oppositional defiant disorder where everything must be denied. "YES and" responses are off limits.

They cant just say "Yes, and poor chemical regulation is turning the frogs gay, and that is a bad thing"

The message is not scientific complain about frog, read message is that "we" should band up against "them" and collectively now bully this or that person/group. It is in-group bonding based on common enemy that is vilified.

You can not counteract that with rational rebuttal. That never works, not on schoolyard, not in work, not in politics. The whole things is about making people feel certain way.

So I should adopt poor behavior because some other group did? There's sometimes a point to that for in person interactions with small groups but I don't see how that applies at larger scales. It becomes nothing more than an excuse for the poor behavior of your own in-group, which further exacerbates polarization for little to no benefit.

Realize that such behavior isn't going to change the mind of the opposition, and those in your group already agreed with you regardless. Then the bad behavior is a particularly harmful form of virtue signalling.

Being scientists, they saw an opportunity to study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes. SHOCKING AND SCANDALOUS.

source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...

Only because it somewhat goes against one anti-Trump narrative do we now accuse the commentator of “splitting hairs”/being overfocused on details. Sorry, but details-obsession is part of Hacker News for you. Trump does more than enough idiotic things, I’ve never understood the desire to just make up things about him.

If we’re going to compare January 6 to the George Floyd riots, one was explicitly political, and the other one was fed up populace.

One started with a rally intended to gas the mob up in hopes of securing the capital for their fuhrer. The other was started as the result of the outright murder of an individual by a state actor.

One was essentially organized by the Republican Party leader, and the other was an impromptu display of discontent.

How many Democrats: got up on stage for a rally for themselves then -> told the attendees to go and “peacefully protest” then -> the protestors went and turned into a riot?

How many of the George Floyd protesters were chanting to hang a public official? With the intent of dismantling democracy?

These are not the same.

The one thing that is absolutely undebatable is that he wasn't talking about transgenic research, yet somehow that has become the meme.

He attempted a bit of misinformation, which characterizes most of his address. Certainly, his supporters interpreted it to mean transgender mice. IMO, this was deliberate. If it wasn’t deliberate, then Trump is just an idiot. If it was deliberate, then he’s purposefully spreading misinformation in pursuit of some culture war.

No matter how you cut it, it reflects very poorly on our president.

In the current online discourse climate...

The HN community can be a good candidate to collectively, over time and use... develop and refine a set of commonly understood tags to communicate context in post titles.

If not in title, then maybe in the top / "pinned" comment.

If they can spread beyond HN... that would be even better.