About 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans – out of 66 million who were shot – were still infected with COVID-19, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.
Infections, called discovery cases – or positive test results that occur at least two weeks after a person receives the final dose of coronavirus vaccine – account for about 0.008 percent of Americans who are fully vaccinated, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The federal agency found that 29% of the infections found were asymptomatic, while 7% were hospitalized. To date, 74 people have died from discovered infections – but it is unclear what vaccine they received, whether patients came from high-risk groups or whether there were other circumstances that contributed to the deaths.
More than 40 percent of the discovery cases, which come from just 40 states, occurred in people over the age of 60, and 65 percent of those infected were women, the CDC told reporters.
The CDC is expected to release findings on the underlying infections next week, the outlet reported.
On Thursday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky testified on Capitol Hill about the causes that could cause revolutionary infections, saying the agency is “closely following” the cases.
“Some of these findings are, of course, failures of an immune response in the host, and then some of them, we’re worried, could be related to a circulating variant, so we’re looking at both,” Walensky said.
Health officials have said they are expecting revolutionary infections because none of the vaccines currently approved for distribution are 100% effective.
“You’ll always see some revolutionary infections, no matter how effective your vaccine is,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told the store.
“Before people are excited about the quantitative number of infections, they need to understand who the denominator is and we will see progress in the efficacy rates of 90%, 95%, 97% vaccines.”
There are a number of reasons why people can become infected after being completely vaccinated, David Hirschwerk, an infectious disease physician for Northwell Health System, told WSJ.
Older people or those with compromised immune systems may not be able to launch a robust immune response to the vaccine and accumulate enough antibodies to prevent infections, the doctor explained.
In other cases, new variants, some of which have been shown to be more transmissible, may circumvent vaccine protection. And at other times, a patient might just be exposed to a particularly heavy viral load during a scattering event, for example, the outlet said.
“The experience so far is that the vaccine remains extremely effective and those who had discovered infections had very easy and manageable diseases,” said Hirschwerk, who treated a patient with a revolutionary infection.
“This is really what we see every season with the flu vaccine.”
The CDC intends to perform genomic sequencing of respiratory samples taken from patients with discovered infections to gain a better understanding of the role that variants play and how they are maintained against vaccines.
Additional reporting by Jackie Salo