This, he thought, could not happen. But yes: He tested positive for the coronavirus.
“It was a big surprise,” he said. He knew that a vaccine was not perfect and that the Pfizer-BioNTech pictures he obtained were found to be 95% effective in a large clinical trial. “But somehow in my mind, it was 100%,” he said.
The doctor, who asked anonymously to protect his privacy, is among the very few reported cases of people who became infected after being partially or even vaccinated. Nearly 83 million Americans have received at least one dose of COVID vaccine, and it is unclear how many of them will get the “breakout” disease, although two new reports show that the number is very small.
One study found that just 4 out of 8,121 fully vaccinated employees at Texas Southwestern University Medical Center in Dallas were infected. The other found that only 7 out of 14,990 employees at UC San Diego Health and David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, take a positive test two weeks or more after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna get vaccines. Both reports, published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, show how well the vaccines work in the real world, and during a period of intensive distribution.
But these outbreaks, while rare, are a stark reminder that vaccinated people are unbelievable, especially when the virus is circulating widely.
“We felt strongly that this data should not lead people to say, ‘We all get vaccinated and then we can all stop wearing masks,'” Dr Francesca J. Torriani said. an infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego Health who led the California study. “These measures must continue so that more sections of the population can be vaccinated.”
Only some of the COVID-positive health workers in the California study showed symptoms, she said, and they tended to be moderate, suggesting that the vaccines were protective. That reveals data from the vaccine tests showed that fracture infections were moderate and did not require hospitalization. Some people had no symptoms, and were detected only through tests in examinations or as part of their medical care.
For example, doctors at the University of North Carolina found a few asymptomatic cases in vaccinated patients diagnosed for the coronavirus prior to surgery or other medical procedures, according to Dr. David Wohl, the medical director of that center ‘s vaccine clinic.
He said a lack of symptoms may have meant that the vaccine was doing exactly what it should have done: stop people from getting sick, even if it doesn’t stop the virus from infecting them.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a small team investigating outbreaks, said the group’s spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund. One question the researchers are considering is whether specific variants of the coronavirus may play a role in fracture cases.
“Currently, there is no evidence that post-vaccination COVID-19 is due to changes in the virus,” Nordlund said.
In the coming months, Pfizer and Moderna are expected to release data that should reveal how often vaccinated people get the virus, even if they have no symptoms. The companies have been testing participants in their vaccine tests for antibodies to a protein called N that is part of the coronavirus but not part of the vaccine. By detecting these antibodies a vaccinated person has contracted the virus. Some volunteers from the studies also get their noses regularly to test for active viral infection.
Another question is how effective the vaccines are in people whose immune systems are weakened by illness or medication, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. Fractures can occur in these people because their bodies cannot respond strongly to vaccines.
“And it’s amazing how immune immunocompromise is,” Schaffner said. He said the condition was “a testament to modern medicine,” as many patients with it are being successfully treated for less recent illnesses.
The doctor who became ill remained in New York despite a full vaccination alone at home for nearly two weeks. He said his illness was relatively mild, and said he was treated with monoclonal antibodies to fight the virus. “If the worst flu was 10, it was four,” he said.
Without the vaccine, he said, he thinks he would have been sicker.
“I would be scared to death,” he said. “But I didn’t have any worries. I didn’t think I was going to die. Thinking you won’t die – that’s a very big thing. ”