New research counters high-profile claims that people who had COVID don’t benefit from vaccination
Even people who have had COVID-19 receive long-lasting benefits from a full course of vaccination, according to three recent studies. What's more, one of the studies found that the ‘hybrid’ immunity caused by vaccination and infection is long-lasting, conferring highly effective protection against symptomatic disease for at least six to eight months after vaccination.
Just such a claim helped to launch some of the research. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro “said that he already had COVID-19, and for this reason, it is not necessary to take a vaccination”, says Julio Croda, an infectious-disease doctor and epidemiologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Croda and his colleagues drew on Brazilian vaccination and infection databases to test such assertions.
‘Immunity’ passports? Some authorities consider previous infections when deciding who should have entry to public places such as concerts and restaurants, but others consider only vaccination status. Peter Nordström, an epidemiologist at Umeå University in Sweden, says this dichotomy prompted him and his colleagues to perform another of the studies.
Epidemiologist Victoria Hall at the UK Health Security Agency in London and her colleagues performed the third study by tracking infections in thousands of health-care workers from March 2020 to September 2021. The researchers found that previous infections prevented more than 80% of the COVID-19 cases that otherwise would have been expected in the year after infection, but protection waned to around 70% after a year.
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