Over the last few months, a steady drumbeat of headlines has highlighted the astounding real-world effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The vaccines, study after study has shown, are more than 90% effective at preventing the worst outcomes, including hospitalization and death.
But alongside this good news have been rare reports of severe COVID in people who had been fully vaccinated.
On June 3, for instance, Napa County in California announced that a fully vaccinated woman, who was more than a month past her second Moderna shot, had died after being hospitalized with COVID. The woman, who was over 65 and had underlying medical conditions, had tested positive for the Alpha variant, which was first identified in Britain.
Although these cases are tragic, they are uncommon — and not unexpected.
“I’m very sad that she had a sufficiently severe illness that it actually led to her death,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University. But, he noted, “we expected to have the occasional breakthrough infection.”
Such cases should not dissuade people from getting vaccinated, scientists said. “There is not a vaccine in history that has ever been 100% effective,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “This is your best chance of avoiding severe, critical disease. But as is true of everything in medicine, it’s not perfect.”
Severe COVID is rare in people who have been fully vaccinated. In a paper published last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that it had received reports of 10,262 breakthrough infections by April 30.
Of those breakthrough cases, 10% of patients were hospitalized and 2% died — and in some of those cases, patients were hospitalized or died from something unrelated to COVID-19. The median age of those who died was 82.
Breakthrough infections are likely to decrease as more people get vaccinated and community transmission rates fall. “The virus will find fewer and fewer people to infect — it will be harder for the virus to work its way through the population,” Schaffner said. “These are great vaccines. In order for the vaccines to work optimally — on an individual basis and a community basis — as many people as possible have to be vaccinated.”
By Emily Anthes
c.2021 The New York Times Company