So you got vaccinated and then you got COVID. Now what?
Those methods of tracking vaccine effectiveness aren’t new, even if the virus is. Scientists study post-introduction vaccine effectiveness for every new vaccine that comes out, said Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dutra, a member of the Vaccine Effectiveness & Evaluation Team in the CDC’s COVID-19 Response. And that research has proven crucial to disease prevention.
For example, as part of an effort to eradicate measles in the U.S., scientists began tracking the decades-old measles vaccine in the 1980s. The studies taught them that one dose of this vaccine wasn’t cutting it, according to Dr. Walter Orenstein, professor and associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center at Emory University. In 1989 the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics began recommending that everyone get two doses. If you weren’t looking closely, it would have been easy to miss that a second dose was necessary. The first dose of measles vaccine is 93