After both a prior COVID infection and two doses of Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccine, some people’s immune systems develop an incredible ability to respond to the virus, Report informs referring to the Daily Mail.
Researchers call this ‘superhuman immunity’ or ‘hybrid immunity’ - these patients’ immune systems can produce many antibodies able to respond to different variants, as documented in multiple studies in recent months.
In one study, patients with this ‘hybrid immunity’ demonstrated the ability to respond to current variants of concern, non-human coronaviruses, and potentially even new variants that don’t yet exist.
Scientists are studying these patients to better understand COVID immunity - and immunity against other viruses.
Out of about 173 million Americans fully vaccinated by the end of August, just 10,500 people have been hospitalized with a breakthrough case - and just 2,000 have died of COVID.
These vaccines work by presenting the immune system with a piece of genetic material from the coronavirus - a piece of mRNA - that teaches the immune system to recognize the virus in the event of an infection.
People who recover from COVID are also protected against the coronavirus, as their immune systems remember how to fight off this invader, and with both mRNA vaccination and past infection, patients may become super-protected against COVID.
Recent studies have shown vaccinated-and-infected demonstrating ‘superhuman’ immunity, as some scientists have called it.
“Those people have amazing responses to the vaccine,” said Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist at Rockefeller University who has studied these patients. “I think they are in the best position to fight the virus.”
“The antibodies in these people’s blood can even neutralize SARS-CoV-1, the first coronavirus, which emerged 20 years ago. That virus is very, very different from SARS-CoV-2,” Hatziioannou said.
Here’s how this works, as explained by immunologist Shane Crotty in a June 2021 commentary piece for the journal Science.
‘Natural immunity’ from a prior infection functions differently than immunity from vaccination. In natural immunity, the immune system will build up different safeguards against future coronavirus invasion. This includes B cells and T cells, both of which remember what the virus looks like and can stimulate antibody production in the event of another infection.
The researchers analyzed the immune system readiness of 15 patients who were previously infected with COVID and later vaccinated - compared to patients who were only vaccinated or only infected.
They tested blood plasma samples from ‘hybrid immunity’ patients against six coronavirus variants of concern, the original SARS virus and coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins.
For all these different variants, the ‘hybrid immunity’ patients’ immune systems were able to recognize the invaders and build up antibodies to fight them off.
The researchers even tested a novel coronavirus variant, developed in the lab, that was specifically designed to resist immune system detection. These immune systems could still fight it off.
“One could reasonably predict that these people will be quite well-protected against most - and perhaps all of - the SARS-CoV-2 variants that we are likely to see in the foreseeable future,” said Paul Bieniasz, Rockefeller University virologist and lead on the study.
Immunologists intend to hybrid coronavirus immunity more closely to develop more successful vaccines against this and other diseases.