Disclaimer: This substack entry contains informal musing about variety of scientific issues. It is a messy notebook by design. Hence by its very nature it is bound to include errors, inaccuracies, omissions and other blemishes. Please keep it in mind while reading.
There is an interesting 2020 paper by McFadyen et al. discussing the micro/macro-thrombosis in COVID-19. At first glance it is a hard to read fireworks of hematology erudition.
But if you read it and examine figures carefully it seems to indicate that opposite to the current dogma Spike protein and even its part may suffice to start all sort of thrombotic changes.
The current dogma says that in COVID the micro-macro-thrombosis is triggered by the WHOLE VIRUS so Vaccine which produces only spike protein shall be safe since Spike Protein is just an innocent chemical compound without the virus and it cannot cause the thrombotic cascade on its own.
There are problems with this whole issue:
Pathologists are good but they are not geneticists nor a studious hematologists who could understand the dynamics of Spike protein induced changes.
Pathologists will see the end results of it. But what is the “real killer” is something which is happening before those terminal changes?
The huge clots are scary but what if they are the final stage of even more horrific process in which huge clots formations are actually the maladaptive attempt to “stop” the real pathomechanisms.
Pathologist deal with static matters - they observe the end results of the cascades. But they cannot see in the post mortem exams (nor in live biopsies) the whole dynamic processes which lead to those final findings.
Here are the picture from that paper:
Few would expect such level of DYNAMIC complexity. No wonder we can miss so many things. We don’t observe those things as they unfold we just see the snap-shots of the end. It is like trying to describe how the destruction has occurred based upon the pictures of the cold burned-out ruins. The burned out ruins will not tell us if the destruction happened due to air bombs, rockets or artillery shells. We should see the actual assault in the real time to understand what has really transpired.
The next task for for us was to find out if the notions contained in this early 2020 paper were abandoned due to more recent research or if they were “conveniently” put away into the drawer of the obscurity. We have tried to talk about those issues to the pathologists whom we know and who did study coagulation but they was not interested in discussing it. And this attitude was reflected by the steady decrease in the interest in this paper as the metrics showed.
Also McFadyen paper has been actually used to “debunk” claims about links between COVID-19 vaccines and micro-thrombosis:
Micro-thrombosis in COVID-19 as approached by McFadyen was discussed extensively in the paper by Chen et al. Those authors concluded that :
“Further research is urgently needed to clarify how SARS-CoV-2 infection causes thrombotic complications, and how it affects the course and severity of the disease.”
There are very few papers discussing micro-thrombosis in the context of all types of COVID-19 vaccines (including mRNA vaccines not just adenovector) including two following ones:
Islam A, Bashir MS, Joyce K, Rashid H, Laher I, Elshazly S. An Update on COVID-19 Vaccine Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia Syndrome and Some Management Recommendations. Molecules. 2021 Aug 18;26(16):5004. doi: 10.3390/molecules26165004. PMID: 34443589; PMCID: PMC8400504.
Guetl K, Raggam RB, Gary T. Thrombotic Complications after COVID-19 Vaccination: Diagnosis and Treatment Options. Biomedicines. 2022 May 26;10(6):1246. doi: 10.3390/biomedicines10061246. PMID: 35740269; PMCID: PMC9220036.
The repeated conclusions are reflected by this one from Guetl paper:
“Thrombotic complications were also rarely documented after vaccination with mRNA vaccines, but a typical VITT phenomenon has, to date, not been established for these vaccines.”
So as of October 2022 - it seems that the points which were raised by McFayden - were “conveniently” put away into the drawer of the obscurity by many but not all researchers. For instance, the direct role of spike protein in micro-thrombosis have been demonstrated by at least two papers:
Yu J, Yuan X, Chen H, Chaturvedi S, Braunstein EM, Brodsky RA. Direct activation of the alternative complement pathway by SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins is blocked by factor D inhibition. Blood. 2020;136(18):2080-2089. doi:10.1182/BLOOD.2020008248
Zheng Y, Zhao J, Li J, et al. SARS-CoV-2 spike protein causes blood coagulation and thrombosis by competitive binding to heparan sulfate. Int J Biol Macromol. 2021;193:1124. doi:10.1016/J.IJBIOMAC.2021.10.112
We will keep watching…