SARS-CoV-2 vaccination can elicit a CD8 T-cell dominant hepatitis | Hacker News Reader

SARS-CoV-2 vaccination can elicit a CD8 T-cell dominant hepatitis

journal-of-hepatology.eu

Note that this is different than the hepatitis outbreak in young children (most of whom haven't been vaccinated for COVID). Here's a great explanation of that outbreak: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/hepatitis-mystery

From the paper:

Discussion

Autoimmune-hepatitis-like disease after vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 is now recognized as a rare adverse event not identified in early trials. The widespread use of the vaccine with administration of hundreds of million doses worldwide raises also questions of causality vs. coincidence. In particular, AIH-like disease after vaccination was reported in patients with age and gender characteristics typical for spontaneous AIH[[6], [7], [10]]. While some of these cases thus may represent coincidence, a causal relationship to the vaccine is also possible, such as bystander hepatitis driven by elevation of systemic cytokines or chemokines after vaccination, similar to cases occurring in association with natural SARS-CoV-2 infection[[13]]. The varying patterns of clinical manifestation and the wide range of time elapsed between vaccine administration and symptom onset clearly suggest that different mechanisms may contribute to these reported cases. Here, our analysis highlights that activated cytotoxic CD8 T cells including vaccine-induced spike-specific CD8 T cells could contribute to disease pathogenesis.

A neutral headline would be “immune response triggered by exposure to covid might be bad”. Get the disease, take a vaccine, both are exposure. If you don’t want to take the latter, work to avoid the former.

And the major part of that work should be to optimize your immune system to which end there is a huge amount of research-backed advice available.

Err, that's what vaccination does - it exposes the immune system to "bad things" in safe/small quantities so that a response can be mounted when the corresponding real threat is presented. Some of the difficulty with SARS/MERS/COVID was that the immune response from a younger, healthy person was able to kill them rather than kill the virus.

The optimum would be an immune system that could recognize threats and mount an appropriate response. This is why there's a hunt for common elements of, say, viruses that could be targeted by vaccines - something that is under strong evolutionary pressure to remain constant. Finding such targets would greatly simplify things.

> Liver inflammation is observed during SARS-CoV-2 infection but can also occur in some individuals after vaccination and shares some typical features with autoimmune liver disease. In this report, we show that highly activated T cells accumulate and are evenly distributed in the different areas of the liver in a patient with liver inflammation following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. Moreover, within these liver infiltrating T cells, we observed an enrichment of T cells that are reactive to SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that these vaccine-induced cells can contribute to the liver inflammation in this context.

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