- Elon Musk said Monday he appears to have caught COVID-19 "again" but has "almost no symptoms."
- The billionaire said in November 2020 he'd received a positive COVID-19 test.
- Musk is a longtime critic of vaccine mandates but says he and his family are fully vaccinated.
Elon Musk said Monday he appears to have caught COVID-19 "again."
"How many gene changes before it's not COVID-19 anymore?" the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said on Twitter. "I supposedly have it again (sigh), but almost no symptoms."
Musk didn't say whether or not he'd taken a test to confirm his apparent infection.
He said in November 2020 he'd received a positive COVID-19 test. Before then, he spent months criticizing public health measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, promoting misinformation about COVID-19 such as insisting it wasn't very deadly, and baselessly casting doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines.
"The coronavirus panic is dumb," Musk tweeted on March 6, 2020.
In May 2020, he sent Tesla employees back to work in defiance of local shelter-in-place orders, which he described as "fascist" and "forcible imprisoning."
Musk said in a December 2021 interview with TIME that he and his family were vaccinated because "the science is unequivocal."
However, he said in September 2020 that he and his family wouldn't get vaccinated because they weren't "at risk" of COVID-19.
It's unclear if and when Musk got vaccinated, and if he did, whether it was before or after he received a positive COVID-19 test in November 2020.
It's possible to get COVID-19 multiple times despite being vaccinated, especially if you're infected with a different variant. This is because mutations alter the shape of the virus so disease-fighting antibodies from a previous infection, or from a vaccine response, can't bind onto the virus as effectively to help fend it off.
Musk's positive test in November 2020 meant he couldn't attend a landmark SpaceX launch. He said at the time he had "mild sniffles", a cough, and a "mild fever."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the first US case of the highly-infectious Omicron variant on November 22, 2021, though there may have been undetected cases circulating in the US before that.
The alpha variant was labeled a variant of concern in the US by the CDC on December 29, 2020. It's almost certain alpha was circulating undetected in the US before that date.
Disease experts told Insider that reinfection with Omicron is possible but not common.
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