Approximately 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans – of the 66 million who received the shots – were still infected with COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
Infections, called advanced cases or positive test results that occur at least two weeks after a person gets their final dose of coronavirus vaccine, account for about 0.008 percent of Americans who are fully vaccinated, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The federal agency found that 29 percent of advanced infections were asymptomatic, while 7 percent led to hospitalization. So far, 74 people have died from advanced infections, but it is unclear what vaccine they received, whether patients came from high-risk groups, or whether there were any other circumstances that contributed to the death.
More than 40 percent of advanced cases, which come from only 40 states, occurred in people over 60 and 65 percent of those infected were women, the CDC reported at the outset.
The CDC is expected to release findings on advanced infections next week, the media reported.
On Thursday, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Capitol Hill about what could be causing the advanced infections, saying the agency “monitors” the cases.
“Some of these advances are, of course, failures of an immune response to the host, and then some of them, we’re concerned that they’re related to a circulating variant, so we’re both looking at it,” said Walensky.
Health officials have said that advanced infections are expected to occur because none of the vaccines currently approved for distribution are 100% effective.
“You’ll always see some advanced infections, regardless of the effectiveness of your vaccine,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told the venue.
“Before people get excited about the quantitative number of infections, they need to understand what the denominator is and we will see progress in figures that will be well within 90%, 95% and 97% of effectiveness rates. of vaccines “.
There are several reasons why people can become infected after being completely vaccinated, David Hirschwerk, a doctor in infectious diseases at the Northwell Health System, told WSJ.
Older people or those with compromised immune systems may not be able to initiate a robust immune response to the vaccine and accumulate enough antibodies to prevent infections, the doctor explained.
In other situations, new variants, some of which have been more transmissible, may evade vaccine protections. And other times, a patient might only be exposed to a particularly strong viral load during a superspar event, for example, the dam said.
“The experience so far is that the vaccine is still highly effective and those who had advanced infections have had very mild and manageable diseases,” Hirschwerk, who has treated a patient with an advanced infection, told WSJ.
“That’s really what we see every season with the flu shot.”
The CDC plans to conduct genomic sequencing on respiratory samples taken from patients with advanced infections to gain a better understanding of the role that variants are playing and how vaccines are maintained.
Additional reports from Jackie Salo