Influenza vaccination reveals sex dimorphic imprints of prior mild COVID-19

Acute viral infections can have durable functional impacts on the immune system long after recovery, but how they affect homeostatic immune states and responses to future perturbations remain poorly understood.

Here we use systems immunology approaches, including longitudinal multimodal single cell analysis (surface proteins, transcriptome, and V(D)J sequences), to comparatively assess baseline immune statuses and responses to influenza vaccination in 33 healthy individuals after recovery from mild, non-hospitalized COVID-19 (mean: 151 days after diagnosis) and 40 age- and sex-matched controls who never had COVID-19.

At baseline and independent of time since COVID-19, recoverees had elevated T-cell activation signatures and lower expression of innate immune genes in monocytes.

COVID-19-recovered males had coordinately higher innate, influenza-specific plasmablast, and antibody responses after vaccination compared to healthy male and COVID-19-recovered females, partly because male recoverees had monocytes with higher IL-15 responses early after vaccination coupled with elevated pre-vaccination frequencies of "virtual memory" like CD8+ T-cells poised to produce more IFNg upon IL-15 stimulation.

In addition, the expression of the repressed innate immune genes in monocytes increased by day 1 through day 28 post-vaccination in recoverees, thus moving towards the pre-vaccination baseline of healthy controls.

In contrast, these genes decreased on day 1 and returned to the baseline by day 28 in controls.

Our study reveals sex-dimorphic impacts of prior mild COVID-19 and suggests that viral infections in humans can establish new immunological set-points impacting future immune responses in an antigen-agnostic manner.