CD8A and COVID-19: Next, we parsed all 973 unique experimentally validated CD8 T cell recognized reference SARS-CoV-2 derived epitopes identified in patients with COVID-19, per December 8th 2021, from the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) (34, 41) and aligned these with the sequences spanning the identified non-synonymous mutations in the investigated SARS-CoV-2 variants (Figure 1B).