A case of Covid-19 almost always results in an immune response that provides protection against being infected again. Nevertheless, the CDC recommends people who’ve had Covid-19 should be vaccinated. Here at Forbes, Bruce Lee and William Haseltine have said the same thing.
However, many people are still asking why? Here are four reasons.
The immune response in a vaccinated person is stronger than in someone with immunity from an infection
Antibodies are proteins that the body makes to protect itself from pathogens. Some of these antibodies are “neutralizing” which means that they prevent the pathogen from infecting cells.
Several studies have compared the strength of neutralizing antibodies in blood serum from people who were vaccinated with those who previously had Covid-19. For instance, a study by researchers from Emory University and the University of Texas Medical Branch published last March in JAMA Network showed the immune response in vaccinated individuals to be almost ten times greater than in someone who had recovered from infection.
The immune response in a vaccinated person is more reliable than in someone with immunity from an infection
The same study also found that the immune response in someone who had Covid-19 was about twice as variable compared with the response in someone who didn't. In fact, a number of people who were actively sick when the study was occurring didn’t mount a measurable immune response at all. Not everyone with Covid-19 develops antibodies and a very large study involving more than 30,000 cases found that only about 90% of those with an antibody response developed neutralizing immunity.
What’s more, the likelihood of mounting a strong antibody response is related to the severity of disease. In a study looking at the relationship to disease severity, only 12 out of 15 (80%) asymptomatic patients showed detectable levels of neutralizing antibodies, compared with 46 out of 49 (94%) patients with mild cases and 100% of patients with pneumonia. This compares with 100% response to vaccination with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the German and US clinical trials.
The immune response in a vaccinated person is more robust than in someone with immunity from an infection
With the rise of genetically distinct variants of SARS-CoV-2, there’s also the possibility that some strains of the virus will “evade” the acquired immune response. We don’t yet have data about the effectiveness of all the vaccines against all the different variants.
However, an interesting study that was published earlier this summer looked at a part of that question. Specifically, researchers compared how serum from a person infected with the original strain of the virus responded to being presented with the beta variant. The beta variant is particularly interesting because it appears people infected with this variant are much more likely to exhibit severe disease or death compared with other variants.
Vaccination of people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 increased the immune response to the new variant by approximately 1000 times. That’s a pretty big difference.
Vaccinated people are less likely to experience a breakthrough infection than people with a prior infection are to get Covid-19 a second time
This fourth reason is the kicker. Although the studies cited above provide good reasons to suggest that it would be beneficial for people who previously had Covid-19 to get the vaccine, we only recently obtained data to show just how big the effect is in the messiness of the real world. Now, according to a recent CDC report, we have direct evidence.
Researchers collected data on people in Kentucky who were infected by SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 and then infected for the second time in May and June of 2021. These data were compared with people who had also been infected in 2020, but not reinfected. Whereas only 27.2% of the people who were reinfected had been vaccinated, 42.5% of people in the comparison group had been vaccinated.
From these data, the researchers worked out that the odds of a person being reinfected if they haven’t had the vaccine are 2.34 times greater than those of a person who got the vaccine after recovering from Covid-19.
Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 is rare, at least within a short time after a person’s first case, but it’s a lot rarer for those who have been vaccinated.
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