People Who’ve Had COVID-19 Should Still Get Vaccinated. Here’s Why

• Researchers say people who’ve had COVID-19 but remain unvaccinated are more likely to develop the disease again than those who’ve been vaccinated.
• They note that people who developed COVID-19 last year probably didn’t have the Delta variant.
• They add that there’s a possibility that people who’ve had COVID-19 may need only one dose of vaccine, although that issue needs more study.

People who have recovered from COVID-19 and are leaning on their post-illness immunity rather than opting for a vaccine might want to take note.

A new report from the U.S. Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that those who do not get vaccinated after the illness are nearly two and half times more likely to develop COVID-19 again.

The latest research reaches the opposite conclusion of a pre-print study the Cleveland Clinic released in July.

While the new study isn’t surprising news to infectious disease experts, they say this study, based in Kentucky, backs up what they suspected to be true.

“All the dots were there, but we had not explicitly connected those dots,” Dr. Gregg Miller, chief medical officer at Vituity as well as a front-line emergency medicine physician at the Swedish Edmonds Campus in Seattle, told Healthline.

This CDC study, he said, does just that.

“The evidence is very clear,” Miller said. “If you’ve had COVID-19, you should still get the vaccine.”