As the original SARS-CoV-2 strain continues to mutate, the efficacy for the updated, omicron-targeted vaccines expected to deploy mid-September could depend on each person's past exposure, The Washington Post reported Aug. 23.
The phenomenon is named the original antigenic sin — a term that some health experts say should axe "sin" — and it means every person's COVID-19 inoculation status, whether they were infected with COVID-19 and which variant they caught, could affect their future immune response. It can also affect how someone responds to an updated vaccine.
"People are now walking around with different immune-imprinted covid responses, depending on what vaccine schedules they've had — one, two or three doses — and what infections they have had in the past," Rosemary Boyton, a professor of immunology and respiratory medicine at Imperial College London, told the Post.
The public's waning immunity against every new mutation isn't news, but the original antigenic sin could play a role in how well refreshed boosters work.
"Maybe 10 to 15 years from now, we live in a world where the vaccine is birth-year specific or make strain selection decisions that take into account different immune histories in the population," Katelyn Gostic, a researcher at the University of Chicago, told the Post. "I think we need and are actively developing better technologies and better techniques to try to work at the science fiction frontier here, of figuring out these imprinting questions."
Read the full report here.