People with the 'hybrid immunity' of having been both fully vaccinated and previously infected with COVID-19 have the strongest protection against the virus, two new studies said on Friday.
After two years of a pandemic that has seen nearly 500 million people infected and billions vaccinated, the studies highlighted the importance of getting jabbed for those who have natural immunity after recovering from the disease. FILE PHOTO
One of the two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases medical journal analyzed the health data of more than 200,000 people in 2020 and 2021 in hard-hit Brazil, which has the world's second-largest COVID-19 death toll. "Hybrid immunity due to exposure to natural infection and vaccination is likely to be the norm globally and might provide long-term protection even against emerging variants," Pramod Kumar Garg of India's Translational Health Science and Technology Institute said in a comment piece linked to the study.
Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia who was not involved in the study, told AFP that the 20 months of "very good protection" from natural immunity was "far better than we would expect for the original two-dose vaccine schedule".