At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, people were hopeful that pre-existing immunity to the common cold could protect you from COVID.
But in a new study from the University of Rochester, researchers found that sometimes the opposite can happen.
They found that prior infection and immunity to one of the common cold coronaviruses may have put people at risk of more severe COVID illness and death.
In the study, the team examined immunity to various coronaviruses, including the COVID-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, in blood samples taken from 155 COVID patients in the early months of the pandemic.
Of those patients, 112 were hospitalized and provided sequential samples over the course of their hospitalization.
These hospitalized patients experienced a large, rapid increase in antibodies that targeted SARS-CoV-2 and several other coronaviruses.
While big boosts in antibodies—protective proteins generated by the immune system—is usually a good thing, in this case, it wasn’t.
The team showed that these antibodies were targeting parts of the spike protein (which sits on the surface of coronaviruses and helps them infect cells) that were similar to common cold coronaviruses the immune system remembered from previous infections.
Unfortunately, targeting those areas meant the antibodies could not neutralize the new SARS-CoV-2 virus.
When levels of these antibodies rose faster than levels of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, patients had a worse disease and a higher chance of death.
The team says in people who were sicker—those who were in the ICU or died in the hospital, the immune system was responding robustly in a way that was less protective.
This study adds to evidence that a phenomenon called immune imprinting is at play in COVID immune responses.
The team likens this phenomenon to ‘immune distraction’: immunity to one threat (seasonal coronaviruses) hijacks the immune response to a new, but similar threat (SARS-CoV-2).
Immune imprinting has been linked to poor immune responses to other viruses, like flu, and can have implications for vaccine strategies.
By some predictions, COVID is likely to be with us for a long time—with new, milder strains emerging and circulating on an annual or seasonal basis.
If those predictions hold true, the study suggests that we will need to regularly develop new vaccines targeting the new strains of SARS-CoV-2.
While none have come to market yet, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna have been developing and testing new versions of their COVID vaccines as new variants of concern have emerged.
If you care about Covid, please read studies that flu shot may help prevent severe COVID-19, and scientists find antibodies that can neutralize Omicron.
For more information about health, please see recent studies that for people over 50, even ‘mild’ COVID 19 can cause dangerous health problems, and results show this low-cost drug can treat COVID-19 effectively and safely.
The study is published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and was conducted by Martin Zand et al.
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