If I ’ve Had COVID-19, Do I Still Need Two Doses of Vaccine?

While there are three safe and effective vaccines authorized in the U.S. to protect against COVID-19, there’s still a lot about vaccine immunity that researchers are still trying to figure out. One question has to do with the millions in the U.S. who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and recovered. Do they have natural immunity because of their infection, and if so, do they still need to get vaccinated? How much additional protection do the vaccines give them? In a study published April 1 in Nature Medicine, researchers led by a team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center report that people who recovered from COVID-19 generated the same level of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 after one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as people who have never been infected and receive the recommended two doses of the shot. The data will raise questions about why people who have recovered from COVID-19 need two doses, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control continues to recommend that people receive two doses of shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which were designed and tested as doube-dose regimens. Getting both doses provides the optimum protection against disease, they say. In some ways, the results aren’t surprising, since immunity generally works on a what scientists in the field call a “prime-boost model”: immune cells need to be primed, or exposed to a virus—in this case with a first dose of a vaccine—in order to later on recognize it as foreign and...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news