People who have overcome covid and have been vaccinated have “surprisingly high” protection

There is no difference between getting infected with coronavirus and then getting vaccinated or getting vaccinated and then getting infected; in either case, you get a “very robust, surprisingly high” immune response, according to one study.

These results are published in the journal Science Immunology and confirm that vaccination before or after SARS-CoV-2 infection can

“There is no difference between getting infected and then getting vaccinated, or getting vaccinated and then getting an infection,” says Fikadu Tafesse of the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine, United States.

According to the researcher, “In either case, you will get a very, very robust immune response,

In both, the measured immune response revealed equally more abundant and more powerful antibodies – at least 10 times more powerful – than the immunity generated by vaccination alone, details a university statement.

The study was done before the advent of Omicron, but the researchers expect hybrid immune responses to be similar with this variant.

To reach their conclusions, they recruited 104 people, all university employees (96 had received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, six from Moderna, and two from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson).

They divided them into three groups: 42 who were vaccinated without any infection, 31 who were vaccinated after an infection and 31 who became infected after the vaccination schedule.

The researchers took blood samples from each participant and

They found that the two “hybrid immunity” groups generated higher levels of immunity compared to the vaccinated group without infection.

Since the wildly contagious omicron is now circulating around the world, the new findings suggest, the authors say, that each new advance of the infection potentially brings the pandemic closer to the end.

At this point, researchers believe many people will end up with hybrid immunity: Over time, the virus will run into a growing group of

But remember that millions of people in the United States and around the world remain unvaccinated; with the spread of Ómicron it is likely that many unvaccinated people who were already infected will again face the virus.

For that group, previous research had already revealed a much more variable level of immune response than vaccination, notes Bill Messer, who adds: “I can guarantee that that immunity will be variable and that some people will get immunity equivalent to that of vaccination, but most will not.”

”And there is no way, without laboratory tests, to know who gets what immunity”, so that “Vaccination makes it much more likely that a good immune response will be guaranteed.”

The research published this Tuesday is a continuation of a study from the same university published in December that described after infections after vaccination, the so-called “superimmunity”.

“These results, together with our previous work, point to SARS-CoV-2 potentially becoming a mostly mild endemic infection, such as a seasonal respiratory tract infection, rather than a global pandemic.”, emphasizes Marcel Curlin, another of the authors.