Young children with Covid antibodies due to a prior infection should still get fully vaccinated, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recommended Wednesday.
Like many other infectious diseases, people previously sickened with Covid have some form of protection against getting infected again, but scientists still don’t know how long that immunity lasts or how robust it is, Walensky said.
A CDC study published Friday, which looked at more than 7,000 people hospitalized with Covid-like illnesses, found Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines provided better protection against the coronavirus than a prior infection. Unvaccinated people who had recovered from Covid were about five times more likely to test positive for Covid than people who had received both shots of the mRNA vaccines and had no previous documented infection, according to the study.
