01/23/2024

How COVID-19 Vaccines and Infections are Tweaking Our Immunity

We appear to be on the way to an endemic era for COVID-19

Your immune system may be getting smarter every time you encounter COVID-19, a new study suggests. After getting vaccinated and infected, the immune system generates broader defenses against the virus, including against new variants.

In a paper published Jan. 19 in Science Immunology, researchers in South Korea compared immune cells in the lab from people with a variety of vaccine and infection histories throughout the different Omicron waves, which began in late 2021 with BA.1. People who had been vaccinated with the original Pfizer-BioNTech series and then got infected with any Omicron variant showed good levels of memory immune cells—called T cells—that defended not only against the variants causing the infection, but also related ones in the Omicron family that came later. For example, people who were vaccinated with three doses of the original COVID-19 shot and then got infected with the BA.2 variant generated T cells that could target not just BA.2 but also BA.4/5 and XBB viruses, which didn’t emerge until later.

"This is evidence of cross adaptation between the virus and human beings overall," said Dr. Eui-Cheol Shin, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and senior author of the paper. "It also means we are on the way to an endemic era for COVID-19."

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.