Will COVID-19 Vaccines Give Lifelong Immunity to the Disease? What We Know

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Our best bet to stop COVID-19 is to get as many people vaccinated as possible. Noam Galai/Getty Images
  • Two recent studies have found that infection-induced immunity might last months.
  • Experts believe vaccination would make infection-induced immunity last even longer.
  • Researchers found that many people who recover from COVID-19 and later receive an mRNA vaccine may not need further booster shots.

Whether we would develop immunity to COVID-19, or how long that would last if we did, has been a mystery since the early months of the pandemic.

However, two new studies are helping us better understand how our immune systems adapt to infection, and what that might mean for vaccination.

The studies, published in May, find that infection-induced immunity might last months or longer. But experts believe vaccination may lengthen the duration of this immunity.

Another important finding from both studies is that many people who have recovered from COVID-19 and later receive an mRNA vaccine (like the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine) may not need booster shots.

Source: healthline