The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week that breakthrough COVID-19 cases in fully vaccinated people are super rare — a sign the vaccines are working in the real world.
- The CDC report found that breakthrough COVID-19 cases — when a fully vaccinated person becomes infected with COVID-19 — happens for 0.01% of all fully vaccinated people.
- The data showed that 27% of breakthrough cases were asymptomatic.
- The CDC said there were 10,262 breakthrough cases out of 101 million full vaccinations.
The COVID-19 vaccines are not 100% effective — no vaccine really is. But, according to the CDC, the breakthrough cases did not lead to many hospitalizations or deaths, meaning the infections did not have any major clinical significance,
- In total, 10% of the patients were hospitalized.
- Per the data, 2% of the patients died from COVID-19.
- For the hospitalized patients, 29% were symptomatic or hospitalized due to reasons other than COVID-19.
Through people still can be hospitalized against COVID-19, the CDC said the studies prove vaccinations can cut that number significantly.
- “The number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that will be prevented among vaccinated persons will far exceed the number of vaccine breakthrough cases,” the CDC said, per Axios.
Dr. John Brownstein, a chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News that this is a big day for showing the success of vaccines.
- “This report helps confirm, in a real-world setting, that breakthrough infections are rare and when they do happen, they mostly have no clinical significance,” he told ABC News.