MMR vaccine for COVID-19 protection?

The Quarantine Zone
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Some preliminary research suggests vaccines using live attenuated viruses, such as the MMR vaccine, could activate an immune response that could lessen the severity of symptoms if the person is later infected with SARS-COV-2. How much later is an open question; while the MMR vaccine confers lifelong immunity to measles, mumps, and rubella, the broader protection may only last weeks or months.

Adults who received the MMR vaccine as a child will likely still have antibodies against the measles, mumps and rubella viruses, but are unlikely to still have MDSCs, says Dr. Fidel. This means they would require a ‘booster’ vaccination to obtain the potential benefits against COVID-19.

“While the MDSCs are long-lived, they are not life-long cells. So, a booster MMR would enhance the antibodies to measles, mumps, and rubella and reinitiate the MDSCs. We would hope that the MDSCs induced by the MMR would have a fairly good life-span to get through the critical time of the pandemic.”

The researchers have proposed a clinical trial of the MMR vaccine in high-risk healthcare workers and first responders in New Orleans. They have also been awarded a grant to compare the MMR and BCG vaccines in a primate model of COVID-19.

“While we are conducting the clinical trials, I don’t think it’s going to hurt anybody to have an MMR vaccine that would protect against the measles, mumps, and rubella with this potential added benefit of helping against COVID-19.”
– Dr. Paul Fidel

If their hypothesis is correct, the authors say use of the MMR vaccine could present a ‘low-risk-high-reward’ measure to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I decided to go ahead and get a booster shot, since there didn’t seem to be much downside. Kaiser’s benefits department ignored my message asking if I’d be eligible, and since money wasn’t an issue I just paid out of pocket at an unaffiliated urgent care clinic. (Some pharmacies offer these vaccines, but my local one was out of it.) It was $140 and 30 minutes out of my day, including travel time, and it stung but only for a few seconds. I hope there doesn’t end up being a shortage of these vaccines, which are critically important for serving their original purpose (we’ve had some recent measles outbreaks due to anti-vaxxers). But at least until there’s reason to suspect the manufacturers can’t keep up with demand, maybe this is a reasonable harm reduction strategy while we wait for a SARS-COV-2 vaccine.

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I’ve seen similar proposals using the polio vaccine.

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I guess it’s a good thing that I just had a booster last year - I was in the age cohort that might not have complete immunity to measles, so my doc did a tiger, and it turned out that I wasn’t completely immune to mumps instead.

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I wonder why they’re not experimenting with the flu vaccine, especially considering how nervous the CDC etc. are about the possibly of a second wave hitting in time to overlap with flu season. Plus, there’s yet to have been a year even as many as 50% of Americans have gotten a flu shot so it’s much easier to find vaccine naive people to try it on than the MMR that most children have gotten over the past 50+ years, the recent dip caused by antivaxxers notwithstanding.

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I think it’s only the nasal spray, not the flu shot, that contains live virus. But maybe that would work?

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Me, too, but my titer came back “immune”, so I didn’t get a booster.

I had mumps as a child, and I was tested for rubella when I got married – the only question was the measles part. I don’t know if they tested for the others or not.

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GAH titer, not tiger! That would have been quite an experience!

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Tigers might be worth trying as a preventive measure at this point. Gotta enforce social distancing somehow.

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Had to read up on myeloid derived suppressor cells (MDSCs).

After doing so very unimpressed with the article, even if I think that live vaccines boosting the innate response has some promise and should be tested.

MDSCs are a recently studied immature cell line mostly identified as having high numbers correlated with worse cancer outcomes. They make jumps that MMR can increase MDSCs, and that the suppression of the immune response caused by increased MDSCs, would lower the risk of harmful excessive immune responses in COVID-19. They also then argue for that by noting that “epidemiological data suggest a correlation between subjects in geographical locations who routinely receive live attenuated measles-rubella vaccines such as the commonly available MMR vaccine, and reduced COVID-19 death rates” (shots given in childhood) but also discuss how MMR booster would be needed because MDSCs don’t last long enough …?

I suspect/hope the hypothesis that attenuated live vaccines like the MMR and BCG (and likely other real infections) provide some level of innate system protection in some way will pan out, but they are real stretching with their hypothesis.

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Here’s another article on a different study.

Analysis of Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) Titers of Recovered COVID-19 Patients

They studied blood titer levels for mumps, comparing a group who had received the MMRII vaccine as a child versus those who did not, but got mumps protection from other means.

Very interesting.

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I found it hard to understand the implications of the study from the part you quoted. Here’s the first paragraph of the “discussion”:

We found that high mumps titers (134 to 300 AU/ml) from MMR II vaccinations were found only in subjects with asymptomatic and functionally immune COVID-19 cases. Subjects with moderate and severe cases of COVID-19 all had low mumps titer values (below 75 AU/ml). The significant inverse correlations that we observed in the MMR II group between mumps titers and severity, as well as between mumps titers and symptom scores, indicate that there is an association between mumps titers and COVID-19. This significant inverse correlation existed at all ages. In contrast, similar associations were not identified for measles or rubella titers. Prior research had suggested a possible relationship between COVID-19 and measles or rubella, in addition to mumps, based on the sequence homology of each with SARS-CoV-2 (13). Our findings, however, have placed more emphasis on mumps.

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I will admit the study had a small sample size. 80 people is tiny. But the strong correlation within that sample is very suggestive and recommends further study.

My interest was the part quoted in the Importance paragraph. It outlines specifically the peculiar behaviors of COVID19 - particularly that children are affected at such a tiny rate. Typically respiratory viruses hit children hard. That there may be some protection granted to covid by current immunization for other diseases is heartening, because it supports that vaccines can give long-term immunity or suppression.

Also, it might give people an alternative to taking these new-fangled vaccines with fancy technology rushed through the approval process. If this study bears out, people who are skeptical of anything pumped out by the Trump administration might be more inclined to take a vaccine that is already previously in wide use with known safety.