And they caution that intentional infection among unvaccinated people would be extremely risky. “What we don’t want people to say is: ‘All right, I should go out and get infected, I should have an infection party,’” says Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University who researches the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and was not involved in the study. “Because somebody could die.”
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No one in the study who got a new SARS-CoV-2 infection died—which prevented a comparison of death rates but is a clear sign that vaccines still offer a formidable shield against serious disease, even if not as good as natural immunity. Moreover, natural immunity is far from perfect. Although reinfections with SARS-CoV-2 are rare, and often asymptomatic or mild, they
can be severe.
In another analysis, the researchers compared more than 14,000 people who had a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and were still unvaccinated with an equivalent number of previously infected people who received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The team found that the unvaccinated group was twice as likely to be reinfected as the singly vaccinated.
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