Fully Vaccinated People are also getting infected by the Covid virus. So why this is happening is the question that a lot of people are asking. Is the vaccine not effective? Well, that’s not the case, and experts have given several valid reasons behind this. The info educates the people and also helps in spreading awareness.
For a start, none of the vaccines being deployed in the U.S. or Europe are 100% effective at preventing infection. In addition, new Covid strains such as the highly infectious delta variant — which is now prevalent around the world —have complicated the efficacy picture.
Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at the University of Warwick’s Medical School in the U.K., told CNBC that cases of Covid in fully vaccinated people are a reminder that “no vaccine is 100% effective.”
“There will always be a proportion of individuals who will still remain susceptible to infection and illness,” he said Monday.
“There are also two other factors that impact vaccine effectiveness: (1) waning immunity — we still don’t know how long vaccine-induced protective immunity lasts. This is very likely to be a factor in those elderly and more vulnerable individuals who were vaccinated early in the vaccine rollout program,” he noted.
The second factor, he added, related to “breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals due to the more infectious delta variant.”
Andrew Freedman, a reader in infectious diseases at the U.K.’s Cardiff Medical School, told CNBC that “breakthrough” cases were to be expected.
“The vaccines are very good at protecting against severe infection, hospitalization, and death, but they’re less effective at protecting completely against infection, and we know that many people who have been fully vaccinated are still getting delta infections with, in most cases, mild symptoms,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.
“What we don’t know is whether giving an additional booster will actually increase protection and reduce delta variant infections,” he noted. “These findings confirm our previous data showing that both doses of a vaccine offer good protection against getting infected. However, we can also see that there is still a risk of infection, as no vaccine is 100% effective, and we know that some double vaccinated people can still become ill from the virus,” he said.
Steven Riley, a professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial, said, “The delta variant is known to be highly infectious, and as a result, we can see from our data and others’ that breakthrough infections are happening in fully vaccinated people. We need to better understand how infectious fully vaccinated people who become infected are, as this will help to better predict the situation in the coming months, and our findings are contributing to a more comprehensive picture of this.”
