Feb. 16 (UPI) -- A new study from Northwestern Medicine suggests that the original COVID-19 vaccine worked so well that it actually hurt boosters given too soon by "mopping up" the new shots before they can become effective.
The authors of the new study said that while the boosters are important and necessary to fight off COVID-19 and its various strains, getting the boosters too soon limited their efficacy.
The study was published Tuesday in the latest edition of the medical journal Cell Reports.
Authors of the new study said antibodies from the original vaccine at times attack the boosters as a matter of mistaken identity before the boosters can stimulate the cells from the immune system.
The researchers said they found the same result in humans and mice.
"Those same antibodies that protect you against the virus also clear the vaccine very fast," Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. "They think the vaccine is the virus.
"It is important to clarify that having antibodies and getting boosted is a good thing, so anyone who is due their booster shots should do so. We don't want people to think otherwise."
Penaloza-MacMaster, assistant professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said the lessons from the research will help in future studies.
"The study just pinpoints potential strategies by which next-generation vaccines could be tweaked to improve their efficacy, for example, by developing vaccines that bypass pre-existing antibodies," Penaloza-MacMaster said.
Researchers said in a cohort of 85 people who had been vaccinated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, scientists learned that lower antibody levels before a booster were associated with a higher-fold increase in antibody levels after the booster.
"This suggests that pre-existing antibodies induced by prior vaccinations may negatively affect the level of responses induced by mRNA booster vaccines," Penaloza-MacMaster said.
He said in experiments in mice, scientists found the updated Omicron vaccines were superior to the original vaccines, clearing the Omicron infection if the animal's immune system has never "seen" the original coronavirus through vaccination before.
It found, though, the relative superiority of an Omicron vaccine was more limited if the animal had already had the original vaccine.
The research made the case for longer times between vaccinations, which the study suggest improves the effectiveness of the booster.
"It's better to wait six months than two weeks before you boost, but the reasons for this were not clear," he said. "We have thought this could be simply due to the time-dependent maturation of the immune response.
"But another reason is that the waning of antibodies would allow the booster to persist in the body for a longer time. If the booster shot in your muscle perdures for a longer time, you are likely to develop robust immune responses."
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Study: Original COVID-19 vaccine could attack boosters given too soon - UPI News
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