All U.S. adults are allowed to get booster shots, but some are wondering if they need them. A nurse refills a syringe with Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 at a pop up vaccine clinic in the Arleta neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
ROBYN BECK / AFP via Getty Images
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ROBYN BECK / AFP via Getty Images
All U.S. adults are allowed to get booster shots, but some are wondering if they need them. A nurse refills a syringe with Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 at a pop up vaccine clinic in the Arleta neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
ROBYN BECK / AFP via Getty Images
Federal health officials are urging Americans to boost their immunity ahead of the winter break by getting a boosted COVID-19 vaccine. But not everyone works with the same protections when it comes to virus prevention.
More than 47 million people in the US have contracted the coronavirus, at least according to officially recorded numbers. In fact, it could be more than millions.
Some unknown proportion of these people are also vaccinated, meaning they now possess what scientists call hybrid immunity. This is what happens when your immune system has essentially done both a costume maneuver against the virus – thanks to the vaccine – and a real-life operation – thanks to the virus.
So if you’ve had a symptomatic case of COVID, do you really need a booster?
Perhaps this is not a shock that scientists are still not entirely sure. Booster drugs haven’t been available for a long time for most Americans, and studies to understand how necessary they are for everyone – let alone those who have been infected and vaccinated – remain. have to be done.
But the scientists say their best guess is that, all in all, people with hybrid immunity had better immunity than vaccinated people who have never had COVID or who have been infected with COVID. but not vaccinated.
“To be fair, your immunity will be stronger so the chance of getting the disease, especially with the delta variant, is very, very low,” Dr. Duane Wesemann, an immunologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Think of the immune system and coronavirus like you’re learning an instrument: practice once and you’ll remember the song the next day, but – if you stop – you probably won’t learn a year later . “The same principles apply to the immune system,” says Wesemann. “You’ll spend more time, more effort, into holding on to something you’ve seen a few times.”
And if you’ve been infected and vaccinated, that’s a lot of work.
However, just because you have stronger immunity doesn’t mean you should get booster shots. This is especially true if you are already predisposed to developing severe COVID-19, John Wherry, Director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania.
All of this is still being studied, but Wherry says there’s no reason to think people with hybrid immunity would be at risk from getting another shot.
“The safety profile looks pretty much the same during primary and booster vaccinations and it doesn’t make much of a difference depending on whether you have had COVID before,” he said.
Our best picture of the power of hybrid immunity comes from studying people who have been infected and then vaccinated – what some Scientists have even described like “superhuman immunity.”
“That kind of looks like you’ve been significantly enhanced,” says Wherry. “They would probably be lowest on my priority list of people needing additional injections.”
Research shows that people with this type of hybrid immunity make more antibodies, and the response is not only more stable, but also really robust across the variants, said Wesemann, whose lab has the lab. immune response studies in people who have been infected and subsequently vaccinated.
So what is a person’s level of protection against the opposite situation – when a fully vaccinated person later develops a breakthrough infection? “You will probably have superior immunity at this point,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic.
Most likely, this brand of hybrid immunity will be on par with those seen in people who have recovered from COVID-19 and subsequently been vaccinated, but there may be slight differences in the details of the response. immunity, says Wherry. “But these things can be different it may not be important for any person to prevent further infection.”
All of these need to be studied to arrive at a more precise answer. Until then, the lesson remains the same regardless of how you’ve achieved hybrid immunity: There’s no urgent need for booster shots in healthy, low-risk people. But if you’re at higher risk due to underlying conditions or live or work in close proximity to someone, it can be a good extra layer of protection for you and those around you.
“The potential benefit of providing higher immunity is there, and the risks are minimal,” Wesemann says. “I would probably recommend it to a group of individuals that I think are at high risk.”
