re: Fauci says vaccine won’t stop transmission

Wife works for a clinic associated with LCMC and due for her second dose tomorrow.

Well a nurse from the hospital called her around 2 o’clock this afternoon and asked if she wanted to come in today to get her second dose instead of tomorrow because they have a bunch of doses leftover. Unfortunately she had already left work and had to decline

So they have the doses available but can’t get enough people to come take the vaccine??

Wtf is going on??

I guess their immune systems were weakened by the vaccine?? I have no idea. If I do know that two nurses missed 7 days of work and one missed two full weeks.

This is not simple but will try.
Yes it is possible because we are born with a large repertoire of T cell receptors. As an infant, certain T cells get deleted in the thymus that are auto-reactive (in theory) and others don’t. If you really want to geek out, do a browser search for T cell receptors.

But remember, for vaccines and such, the goal is that the “adaptive” immune system (think T and B cells) work in concert to form a memory response so that subsequent exposure to the same antigen (a piece of the infectious agent) elicits a more rapid response and clearance. In general the virus or vaccine is digested by cells called “antigen presenting cells” (macrophages/monocytes and dendritic cells). These cells put a small piece of the agent on their surface and hopefully a T or B cell comes by that is a match and gets activated (this is a very high level description). Now the B cells will hopefully expand and mature into antibody producing plasma cells and start pumping antibodies out. A few will not mature but hang around for a long time waiting for the next infection (these are called effector memory cells and are vital to long term immunity). Now T cells, in general are Cd8s (which kill) and cd4s ( which help other CD8s and B cells expand) typically after vaccination you see CD8s about 14-21 days and CD4s about 28-35 days later. These cells also make the effector memory long lasting cells for the next exposure. And the CD4s are really vital to B cell expansion and antibody production. But this lag in time between exposure and large T cell populations and antibody production is the window where we get “sick”. Now there is another part of the immune system dedicated to the initial fight, and that is the innate immune system. Main cell is NK cells. They work, but data has shown they get exhausted in covid and other viruses, which if that happens before the T and B cells kick in, you can get into severe symptoms.

So yes, you can have, probably do have, some T cells specifically for this virus, but if they haven’t been “primed and expanded” by prior exposure, they take a while to kick in and if the innate system can’t control initial infection, that is where trouble can get bad.

By the way, remember these cells are called lymphocytes, so if you have ever felt a swollen lymph node when you were sick, you were feeling these cells expand within the lymph node to fight off the infection, viral or otherwise, so it shows you much expansion takes place, since, in general a 1cm lymph node has 1 Billion cells in it.