Scientific American
Pandemic highlights for the week
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A woman gives the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in Krakow, Poland on May 1, 2021 Credit: Omar Marques
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A 5/5/21 post by Katelyn Jetelina at her site Your Local Epidemiologist lays out the case for getting a COVID-19 vaccine even if you’ve tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 or recovered from the disease it can cause. The vaccines strengthen our immune response to the virus by giving us another “dose” of virus protection (the vaccine), she writes. And “the vaccine looks to better protect against variants than natural infection,” Jetelina writes, describing why Israel recently changed its policy from not vaccinating people with past SARS-CoV-2 infections to vaccinating them. The change was based on research, including a study of blood samples taken from health care workers after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, before vaccination and after vaccination. The researchers “infected” the blood samples with variants of the novel coronavirus, Jetelina writes, and found that “vaccines were better at increasing the number of neutralizing antibodies than natural infection. In other words, you have more soldiers.” And the vaccines appear to have provoked subjects to create more neutralizing antibodies against the variants initially reported in South Africa (B.1.351) and in Brazil (P.1), writes Jetelina, whose day job is at the University of Texas Health Science Center.