COVID-19 has been going on for nearly three years, and with another set of COVID booster shots ready to roll out, some scientists are taking a step back, cautioning that there still are some unanswered questions on how the shots work.
They say more research needs to be done on what is known as “original antigenic sin,” meaning how the body’s immune system responds to repeated introductions of the COVID variants. Also known as immune imprinting, the frequent boosting — some people may be lining up for their fifth shot — may be “handcuffing the body's natural immune system and leaving it exposed to radically different variants that might emerge in the future.”
While some doctors disagree, Dr. Paul Offit, a virologist who is a frequent go-to doctor for media quotes about vaccines, says "Where this matters is if you keep giving booster doses with [original] strain, and continue to lock people into that original response. It makes it harder for them to respond then to essentially a completely different virus.”
This is where the “original antigenic sin” component comes into play, as “some experts say they are concerned that frequent boosting with the original version of the vaccine may have inadvertently exacerbated immune imprinting,” ABC News reports.
SOURCE:
ABC News September 7, 2022