I’m attending the virtual American College of Rheumatology Convergence conference. This post covers the opening sessions for Thursday, November 5th.
Dr. Eric Rubin, MD, Ph.D., talked about COIVD-19 vaccines.
- Mechanism of immune response might tell us why some immunosuppressed people are at high risk and others aren’t.
- Safe vaccine for us.
- Could possibly trigger or suppress pre-existing autoimmunity. This is hard to predict, esp w/ multiple vaccines.
- Monoclonal antibody therapy is difficult.
- You have to administer before the patient develops their own antibodies. If they’ve reached that point, there is little if any benefit. It’s not really a sustainable procedure but might be good for high-risk patients if caught early on.
- Remdesvir can shorten infection length but doesn’t necessarily improve survivability.
- An immune response from a vaccine is different than those from infection. Population-based studies show little decline in immunity over time while smaller studies are showing some decline. The problem is we don’t know the ideal antibody level to protect someone from infection/re-infection.
Dr. Jinoos Yazdany, MD, MPH, covered the year in review. Perhaps my favorite thing was that hydroxycholoroquine has been definitively shown to not help with COVID-19 at all, even at higher doses. Dr. Yazdany also shared that there is mounting observational evidence that patients who are on over 10 mg of steroids have a higher COVID-19 infection rate.
Dr. Richard Bucala also went through some pivotal research for the following:
That wraps up a small synopsis of today’s session. The conference truly kicks off tomorrow. Feel free to follow me on Twitter where I’ll be sharing my thoughts using the ACR hashtag #ACR20.