‘Some people mount an immune response able to fend off a menagerie of coronavirus variants...
‘Some of the vaccines that have been administered to millions of people might already be triggering variant-resilient immune responses. In another March preprint, a long-running COVID-19 study in Seattle, Washington, reported that after receiving a single dose of an mRNA vaccine, participants who had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2 produced heaps of antibodies that can neutralize B.1.351, as well as an earlier circulating variant8. Those people also produced much higher levels of antibodies than typically seen even in those who have received two vaccine doses.
‘Leonidas Stamatatos, an immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle who co-led the study, suspects that a single vaccine dose boosted the levels of pre-existing antibodies that were capable of recognizing diverse variants. It’s not clear how to mimic this response in people who haven’t had COVID-19. One possibility is that a lag of several months between infection and vaccination was responsible, and that its effect could be replicated with another vaccine dose, given six months or a year after the first two, says Andy McGuire, an FHCRC immunologist who co-led the study.’
Read here (Nature, March 19, 2021)
