Here's One More Justification for Maintaining Up to Date COVID Vaccine Boosters

 

According to recent research, receiving COVID-19 immunizations on a regular basis may boost our immunity to the virus and its future variations, provided the effects don't wear off too quickly. This is in addition to the established defense against existing infections that they already offer.
This is encouraging news because there are still hundreds of patients being admitted to hospitals every day, a growing number of us are battling long-term COVID, and new variants are still emerging quickly.
"These data suggest that if these cross-reactive antibodies do not rapidly wane – we would need to follow their levels over time to know for certain – they may confer some or even substantial protection against a pandemic caused by a related coronavirus," says Michael Diamond, an immunologist at Washington University.
Booster doses don't always make other immunizations, like the flu shot, more effective. Our immune system develops antibodies in response to initial immunizations, enabling us to identify and combat invading viruses. Memory immune cells store information about the antibody and are able to swiftly produce more of the targeted antibodies in order to fight against a resurgence of the virus.
These cells are therefore so adept at what they do when it comes to the flu that they subdue our efforts to add updated antibodies through further vaccinations. This is troublesome because it reduces our body's ability to preserve the details of the more recent antibodies in memory B cells, which weakens our defense against new virus strains.
There was also some worry that the COVID-19 vaccination would cause this. Thus, Washington University immunologist Chieh-Yu Liang and colleagues studied the memory B cell antibodies following various vaccination combinations using a mouse model and human volunteers who had caught SARS-CoV-2.
Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that the immune system's reaction to different virus strains gets stronger with each dosage, indicating positive imprinting. Instead of finding antibodies unique to any one variation in humans or mice, the researchers discovered that most of the antibodies reacted to both of the tested COVID-19 strains, omicron and original.
Additional testing in mice showed that the antibody response was not only capable of combating a variety of SARS-CoV-2 strains but also of suppressing SARS-CoV-1, the virus that originated in the 2002–2003 pandemic.
According to Diamond, imprinting can be neutral, negative, or positive in theory. "In this case, we see strong imprinting that is positive, because it's coupled to the development of cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies with remarkable breadth of activity."
Since the immune response was only tested one month after the most recent booster, there are still unanswered questions regarding the durability of the antibodies in our system. Furthermore, since the study only looked at mRNA vaccinations, results with other vaccine types might differ. Additional research is necessary to see whether these findings hold true more generally, especially in children, as the number of human trials was restricted.
Yet these injections have prevented at least tens of millions of deaths as there was ambiguity around COVID-19 vaccinations early in the pandemic. Furthermore, numerous studies have conclusively shown that there are very few serious side effects from vaccinations, particularly when compared to the continuous and cumulative hazards from viral infection.
According to the latest study, there's even more incentive for us to continue taking boosters on a daily basis.
"At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world population was immunologically naïve, which is part of the reason the virus was able to spread so fast and do so much damage," Diamond explains. "We do not know for certain whether getting an updated COVID-19 vaccine every year would protect people against emerging coronaviruses, but it's plausible."