For fully vaccinated people, the risk of contracting COVID-19 remains extremely low, a new New York study suggests.
Among the 417 Rockefeller University employees who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer or Moderna injections, two of them, or about 0.5%, later became infected, according to the study published Wednesday in New England Journal of Medicine.
“We have characterized authentic examples of infections in fully vaccinated people that manifest as clinical symptoms,” the researchers wrote in their study. “These observations in no way undermine the importance of urgent efforts being made at the federal and state levels to vaccinate the US population. They also support efforts to promote a new booster vaccine (as well as a new vaccine). against pancoronavirus) to provide greater protection against variants. ‘
The Rockefeller University researchers found that variants of the coronavirus with various differences from the original virus caused the infections.
A variant that infected one of the patients had the E484K mutation, which was first found in the B.1.351 variant originally identified in South Africa. E484K has been called an “escape mutant” because it has shown that it could escape some of the antibodies produced by coronavirus vaccines. One of the mutations found in the infections of both study participants included D614G, which emerged early in the pandemic.
One of the infections in fully vaccinated people was the case of a healthy 51-year-old woman who received her second dose of Moderna’s vaccine on February 19. Nineteen days later, on March 10, he tested positive for COVID-19 after developing symptoms.
The other infection was in a healthy 65-year-old woman who received her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on February 9. She later learned that her partner, who was not vaccinated, tested positive for COVID-19 on March 3. The following days, the woman developed her own symptoms. She tested positive for COVID-19 on March 17.
More research is needed to determine whether similar findings related to infections or variants would emerge among a larger group of participants from various parts of the United States.
Experts say that some cases of COVID-19 infections are expected in fully vaccinated people since no vaccine is 100% effective.
Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told Citizen Free Press that so far the agency has received fewer than 6,000 reports of coronavirus infections among more than 84 million fully vaccinated people. in all the country.
The CDC said the cases occurred in people of all ages who had been vaccinated, but just over 40% were in people 60 and older. They were also more prevalent in women and 29% were asymptomatic cases.
The agency said it has developed a national database of COVID-19 infections among fully vaccinated people so that state health departments can report them.
“Infections in fully vaccinated people make up a small percentage of those who have been fully vaccinated. CDC recommends that all eligible individuals get a covid-19 vaccine as soon as it is available to them, ”the CDC said in a statement.