Calling COVID “airborne AIDS” is inaccurate. But what it does to your immune system is still scary

From a biological perspective, it is remarkable how an unassuming virus like SARS-CoV-2 took over the world. In just three years, it’s caused an estimated 640 million COVID infections worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), though that’s almost certainly a gross underestimate.

SARS-2 is also extremely contagious, especially newer variants of the omicron tree. The “variant soup” of new evolutionary branches spawns strains like BQ.1.1, which emerging research shows is the best virus version yet to evade antibody immunity, the body’s primary defense against viruses. invaders. Meanwhile, a person infected with the omicron BF.7 variant will infect an average of 10-18 other people if they ignore any preventative factors like masks or isolation.

Many symptoms of COVID-19 are similar to cold or flu viruses, which usually involve fever, sinus, and breathing problems. Yet SARS-CoV-2 is a very different virus to these in the way it appears to affect our immune system. Some have even compared its effects to other much more serious illnesses that destroy the immune system. That’s because when people get COVID, especially severe cases, it seems to do something devastating to their immune system’s memory. It is the primary way the body uses to identify foreign microbes that pose a threat to our health. T cells, a type of white blood cell that help the body recognize an infection, among many other functions, are an essential part of this reminder system.

Severe cases of COVID can trigger a hyperinflammatory response called a “cytokine storm” so intense that it appears to deplete T cells and decrease their numbers. Although researchers are still discovering how much of a problem this is, there is evidence that it may create serious infection control problems in the future – and not just COVID, but other diseases as well. .

But despite the devastating effects of SARS-2 on the immune system, many people on social media, especially Twitter, began describing COVID as “airborne AIDS” or “airborne HIV.” AIDS stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome while HIV is the sexually transmitted human immunodeficiency virus, which weakens the immune system, increasing the risk of deadly diseases and cancers.

A professor tweeted that ‘airborne AIDS’ could ‘just be what is making humanity disappear’, while others echoed varying levels of fear that a muted government response to COVID will sicken and kill everyone in an avalanche of disease. This label has been around since early 2020, but more and more people now seem to be embracing it.

Salon spoke to epidemiologists and immunologists about these theories about the effects of COVID on the immune system and the “airborne AIDS” label. All have said that calling SARS-2 “airborne AIDS” is deeply inaccurate, stigmatizing and just plain wrong. Yet they also warned that understanding what this virus is actually doing to the immune system is key to developing protective therapies and keeping people safe as cases rise as winter approaches. And some researchers say not enough attention is paid to how SARS-CoV-2 interacts with T cells.

Arjee Restar, social epidemiologist, assistant professor at the University of Washington and affiliate professor in the research faculty at the Yale School of Public Health, said that referring to COVID by this term is “scientifically inaccurate, incredibly irresponsible and deeply insensitive. people living with HIV”. .”

“Although they both target immunological responses, they are vastly different in their epidemiological and socioecological aspects, and therefore very problematic to conceptualize as such,” Restar told Salon in an email. “Not only are the two viruses different in terms of transmission and acquisition, which sets them apart scientifically to begin with, but also the two convey two very different contexts: one is heavily stigmatized and weaponized for anti-Asian hatred, and the other for homophobia and transphobia.”

“It also perpetuates HIV stigma, which people living with HIV and many other community leaders have long fought to de-stigmatize,” Restar added.

Dr. Anthony Leonardi, a T-cell immunologist and master’s student in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said describing SARS-CoV-2 as “airborne AIDS” is “extremely hyperbolic and emotionally evocative”.

Leonardi was one of the first experts to recognize how SARS-CoV-2 damages T cells, which worsens with repeated infections. In late 2020, he and Johns Hopkins University researcher Rui Proenca published research in Frontiers in Immunology describing SARS-CoV-2 as a “lympho-manipulative pathogen,” meaning it impairs immune organs. called lymph nodes and “distorts function, number and death of T cells, and creates a dysfunctional immune response.”

“For years, I’ve been saying these repeat infections have the potential to harm our immune system,” Leonardi said. “I anticipated a cumulative effect.”

But Leonardi argues that’s no reason to compare COVID to AIDS.

“When you use so much hyperbole, you’re doing a disservice to true, real statements that SARS-CoV-2 can actually harm the immune system,” Leonardi told Salon. He pointed out that just because a virus can harm the immune system or even deplete T cells like SARS-CoV-2 does not mean it is analogous to HIV. Measles, for example, can suppress immune memory by destroying T cells, which can take two to three years to recover. But no one calls measles “airborne AIDS.”

Another example is Ebola, a virus with a mortality rate of between 25 and 90%. “Ebola is one of the most effective killers of T cells,” Leonardi said. “If someone gets an Ebola infection, their blood is a graveyard of T cells. It’s a cremation site. It’s just chaos, it’s insane. But we don’t call Ebola ‘airborne HIV.’ or “airborne AIDS”.

It is true that HIV creates immunodeficiency by slowly depleting T cells, but it can take two to six weeks to develop symptoms and around a decade to develop into AIDS. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 can damage the immune system within days.

The two viruses are different species with very unique mechanisms for entering host cells. HIV is a retrovirus, which means it can insert itself into a host’s DNA and lie dormant there until something wakes it up. There is some evidence that SARS-COV-2 can lie dormant in body reservoirs, but it does so in a different way.

Unlike the early days of the HIV pandemic, there are now very effective drugs available for HIV. There are no vaccines for HIV yet, but that may change in the near future. On the other hand, there are many COVID vaccines and they are all quite effective, even against some of the newer variants. And although COVID infection can last for years, many, many people recover. This is not the case with HIV, which is incurable except in the case of a few experimental patients.

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Epidemiologists have long agreed that if HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, were to spread through the air, then it would be an extreme disaster. Some medical experts have imagined this scenario, predicting that infections across the planet could reach 100% as quarantine becomes unnecessary. The long latency of the virus would make it almost impossible to avoid. That is, if SARS-2 was really like airborne AIDS, it would be a serious problem, capable of collapsing global society. Fortunately, the reality is quite different.

“What concerns me, however, is that in many cases, especially in long COVID cases, the virus seems to persist,” Leonardi said. “They can look into the blood, they can still see spike proteins, and they can look at the immune system and the immune system keeps spinning.”

“I feel like the cavalier comparisons between SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses have been a problem all along. [the pandemic.] So it’s just a cold, it’s just a flu. And the other extreme is that it’s essentially “airborne AIDS,” Dr. T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary and genome biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, told Salon. “It’s a very stigmatizing term. And I think it’s not particularly helpful to get people to understand the main point of saying that. It’s not a useful analogy.”