Previous Covid-19 infections likely to provide protection against certain colds, study claims
- Research indicates new strategies for better vaccines that not only tackle the current coronaviruses, but any future ones that may emerge
Getting infected with Covid-19 may protect you from catching a common cold. Photo: Shutterstock A Covid-19 infection may help give you some protection against certain variants of the common cold.
A new study suggests previous Covid-19 infections lower the risk of getting colds caused by milder coronavirus cousins, which could provide a key to broader Covid-19 vaccines.
“We think there’s going to be a future outbreak of a coronavirus,” said Dr Manish Sagar, senior author of the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. “Vaccines potentially could be improved if we could replicate some of the immune responses that are provided by natural infection.”
The study looked at Covid-19 PCR tests from more than 4,900 people who sought medical care between November 2020 and October 2021.
Sagar said he and his colleagues controlled for things like age, gender and pre-existing conditions in their study. After that, they found people previously infected with Covid-19 had about a 50 per cent lower chance of having a symptomatic coronavirus-caused common cold compared with people who were, at the time, fully vaccinated and hadn’t yet gotten Covid-19.
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Several viruses cause colds; coronaviruses are thought to be responsible for about 1 in 5 colds.
Researchers linked the protection against coronavirus-caused colds to virus-killing cell responses for two specific viral proteins. These proteins aren’t used in most vaccines now, but researchers propose adding them in the future.
“Our studies would suggest that these may be novel strategies for better vaccines that not only tackle the current coronaviruses, but any potential future one that may emerge,” said Sagar of Boston Medical Centre.
Dr Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas who was not involved in the study, said the findings shouldn’t be seen as a knock against current vaccines.
These vaccines, he said, are “still your best defence against severe Covid-19 infection, hospitalisation and death”.
But he added: “If we can find targets that cross-protect among multiple viruses, we can either add those to specific vaccines or start to use those as vaccine targets that would give us broader-based immunity from a single vaccination. And that would be really cool.”