SAN ANTONIO - – As the virus that causes COVID-19 keeps mutating, new variants continue to appear.
Experts have consistently said vaccination is the best way to protect yourself but, a question is still surfacing: If you’ve been infected with both the delta and the omicron variants, do you really need a vaccine?
KSAT’s Trust Index team turned to the experts.
“Part of the answer is in that question because if you’ve already had both, it shows the main issue: that you can still get re-infected,” said Dr. Jason Bowling is an infectious disease expert with University Health System and UT Health San Antonio.
He confirmed a recent Trust Index story when people asked if you could get infected with the same variant twice.
“If you had both, there is a potential, unfortunately, unlucky as it sounds, that you could get another variant moving forward, or get infected with the same variant if enough time passes,” Bowling said.
That amount of time is still up for debate in the medical community.
“What we know about natural immunity is it does provide some protection but for a very short time period, and protection doesn’t seem to be as strong as the protection from vaccines. Protection from vaccines also last longer too from the studies that we have,” Bowling said.
So the answer to the question is yes, you should still get the vaccine even if you’ve had COVID from two different variants.
That means it’s “true” on our KSAT Trust Index.
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