People with the “hybrid immunity” of having been both fully vaccinated and previously infected with Covid-19 have the strongest protection against the virus, two new studies said.

After two years of a pandemic that has seen nearly 500 million people infected and billions vaccinated, the studies highlighted the importance of getting jabbed for those who have natural immunity after recovering from the disease, AFP reports.

One of the two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases medical journal analysed the health data of more than 200,000 people in 2020 and 2021 in hard-hit Brazil, which has the world's second-largest Covid death toll.

It found that for people who have already had Covid, Pfizer and AstraZeneca's vaccines offered 90 per cent effectiveness against hospitalisation and death, China's CoronaVac had 81pc and Johnson & Johnson's one-shot jab had 58pc.