This is a beneficial effect of vaccination that we hear less about. Unvaccinated people are twice as likely to be re-infected with the Covid-19 virus as fully vaccinated people, according to a study released Friday by US health authorities. According to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the main federal public health agency in the United States, the findings of the study confirm that "any eligible person can be vaccinated against the Covid -19, regardless of their previous status of infection with SARS-CoV-2 ”, the virus that causes Covid-19.
A new @CDCMMWR finds that people who did not receive # COVID19 vaccine after having COVID-19 were more likely to get COVID-19 again.
People who previously had COVID-19 should get a COVID-19 vaccine to reduce their risk of getting COVID-19 again.
Read more: https://t.co/KZwEEefv6D.
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- CDC (@CDCgov) August 6, 2021
Some American politicians, including Republican Senator Rand Paul, have said they do not intend to be vaccinated because of their natural immunity obtained after contracting the new coronavirus.
The Delta variant not taken into account
The CDC study is based on 246 adults in Kentucky who were re-infected with the virus between May and June this year after being infected for the first time in 2020. They were compared to 492 people "case-controls", according to their sex, age and when they tested positive.
According to the results of the study, people who were not vaccinated were 2.34 times more likely to be re-infected compared to people who were fully vaccinated with products from Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson.
Read alsoCovid-19: can you really be infected three times?
Researchers are still struggling to understand the exact duration of acquired immunity after infection and this could be altered by the emergence of new variants, according to the study.
Laboratory work has shown that blood samples taken from people infected with the original strain of the Wuhan virus had a weak immune response to the Beta variant, identified for the first time in South Africa.
One of the limitations of this study is, however, that it was carried out before the appearance of the Delta variant, which is now the dominant strain of the virus in the United States.
