Is it helpful to get vaccinated if I have already had Covid and therefore have already developed antibodies? The answer is yes. It’s even better. A Brazilian study shows the additional protection provided by vaccination after infection.

obvious difference

Vaccines have been shown to be effective in protecting against severe forms of Covid-19. But does it provide additional protection when an individual has already been infected before? According to Brazilian researchers who evaluated four vaccines in this context, yes.

They evaluated CoronaVac vaccines [Sinovac]ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 [AstraZeneca]Ad26.COV2.S [Janssen]and BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNtech]. To do this, they compared the progression of infection in more than 30,000 cases of re-infection after the first infection, followed by vaccination with a control group, including people who had never been infected before vaccination.

What about Omicron?

For all four vaccines, they were able to find that they were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, then vaccinated, and given “Additional protection against symptomatic infections and severe cases in previously infected individuals”note the authors.

Conducted between February 2020 and November 2021, the study did not consider the Omicron variant, which is more contagious and less susceptible to vaccines.