Immune Systems Advisor

In early 2021, some patients were developing a rare yet life-threatening condition in which their blood would clot after getting a COVID-19 vaccine. In these patients, their bodies were mistakenly attacking their own platelets, causing them to clump together and resulting in blood clots and low platelet counts. Researchers didn’t know why. Now, a 2026 study may offer an answer. In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine , researchers in Australia, Germany, and Canada analyzed 100 patients who took adenovirus vaccines and developed vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, also known as VITT. They found that VITT was likely driven by a change in the antibodies, causing them to switch from harmless to harmful. “This was the missing link that explains how a normal immune response can, in very rare cases, become harmful,” Jing Jing Wang from Flinders University said in a press release . Harmful Antibodies When the immune system encounters foreign invaders like vi...

One of the remarkable observations about SARS-CoV-2 infection is the clinical manifestation of venous and arterial thrombosis.  Multiple studies have described thrombotic complications of the infection including stroke, myocardial infarction, systemic arterial embolism, and deep venous thrombosis with pulmonary embolism. In my practice I have seen virtually every one of these complications.  De Michele and colleagues studied patients with COVID-19 in 2020, before there were vaccines for the population.[i] They found SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein directly attached to platelets within the blood clots retrieved from patients. Importantly, there was no evidence of the entire virus. This suggests the Spike protein disassociates from the virus and becomes its own clot forming missile within the human body. I could anticipate that mRNA, adenoviral DNA, and Spike protein antigen-based vaccines act the same way by generating free Spike protein within plasma which is able to circul...