Annual COVID Vaccines Protect People against Severe Disease, Even with Prior Immunity
Getting a COVID booster could save your life, even if you’ve had multiple prior infections and vaccinations.
A study, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that last season’s 2024–2025 mRNA COVID vaccines reduced people’s risk of emergency department visits by 29 percent, their risk of hospitalizations by 39 percent and their risk of death by 64 percent. Of the nearly 300,000 U.S. participants in the study, 35 percent received the Pfizer vaccine (COMIRNATY), and 64 percent received the Moderna vaccine (Spikevax). According to the study’s authors, COVID vaccination was effective in all age groups and “in persons with or without major chronic conditions.”
The research is in line with what scientists have seen in previous years. “The vaccine is efficacious, particularly against severe disease,” says Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus researcher and a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the study. And he and other experts expect the new 2025–2026 COVID vaccines’ performance will follow suit. The study’s authors declined to comment on the new findings.
The COVID vaccines’ effectiveness against symptomatic disease has generally waned since the first year they became widely available: the 2024–2025 shots offer 29 to 64 percent protection compared with the 94 percent protection given by the vaccines in 2019. This dip, however, is expected in a population with some prior immunity, Perlman says. Nisha Viswanathan, an internal medicine doctor and medical director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Long COVID program, who was not involved in the study, agrees that changes in immunity—and the subsequent response to the vaccines—were anticipated as more people were exposed to the COVID-causing virus, either through prior infection or vaccination.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-study-finds-annual-covid-vaccines-protect-people-against-severe-disease/
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