The prevalence of chronic CMV infection in most countries increases with age (Fowler et al., 2022) and is best known for the inflationary effect it has on the T-cell compartment, particularly in driving clonality in CD8+ T-cells, resulting in an increase in subsets exhibiting an exhausted, senescent-like phenotype, while potentially exacerbating a reduction of the overall pool of naïve subsets (Nikolich-Žugich, 2018). Here, CD8A is linked to cytomegalovirus infection.