Response to different COVID variants depends on previous exposure, study suggests

While the latest COVID vaccine is available now, researchers are already looking ahead to next season. They’re learning that how someone responds to getting the virus or the vaccine depends on what strains of it they’ve had before.

The strain circulating right now – the one that is behind why almost 600 people are hospitalized across the state – is much different than the virus which first emerged here in 2020 and that’s because it keeps evolving.

"The virus needs to spread in order to survive," said Dr. David Montefiori with Duke's Human Vaccine Institute. "So, it's going to find ways to breach that barrier and evade neutralizing antibodies so that it can keep spreading."

Modeling, which has been used for the flu vaccine is now a tool scientists are employing when it comes to looking at COVID, too. Looking at that, scientists from the University of Cambridge found that vulnerability to different mutations depends on previous infections and variants. The study, which Montefiori contributed to, shows that which variant a person was first exposed to determines how well their immune response is to other variants.

"The more times you're exposed to the virus, whether it's through infection and vaccination, and the more variants that you're exposed to either through infection or vaccination, the stronger your immune system is against current more recent variants, and most likely for future variants as well," Montefiori said.

The data paints a picture of how variants are related and the outcome determines if changes need to be made to vaccines.

"We can actually see in a nice visual, how much different the newer variants are from earlier variants," Montefiori said.

While the vaccine helps people to not have strong responses to the virus should it be introduced to their immune systems, Montefiori says it doesn't remove the possibility of someone catching COVID. He feels the virus will be around indefinitely.