Fox News anchor Chris Wallace repeatedly confronted Republican Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts over his opposition to the Biden administrations new coronavirus vaccine mandates and requirements, highlighting the governors seemingly contradictory position on other vaccines.
After President Joe Biden announced a new series of rules that will mandate all federal employees to be vaccinated and require many private-sector employees to either be inoculated or tested weekly, several Republican governorsincluding Rickettsthreatened to fight the presidents requirements in court.
Have at it, Biden curtly responded to the GOP threats.
Interviewing Ricketts on Fox News Sunday, Wallace asked the governor why he was fighting the administrations new COVID-19 rules, especially since Ricketts insisted that hes been encouraging vaccines and believes they work in combatting the pandemic. The Nebraska governor, meanwhile, said he felt the government shouldnt be mandating vaccinations.
I've talked to a number of people, Rickets declared. They've told me, if they make me take the vaccine, I'm just going to be fired.
Wallace retorted that Nebraskas school system actually requires students to be vaccinated against a series of diseases, wondering aloud why Ricketts appeared to be fine with those requirements but not a mandate for the COVID-19 shots.
You say its a personal choice. In fact, to attend school in your state of Nebraska, children must be vaccinated against a number of diseases. They must be vaccinated against Diptheria, tetanus, and pertussis; polio; measles, mumps, and rubella; Hepatitis B; chickenpox, the veteran anchor said.
If the polio vaccine is okay for parents and they have to comply with it to send their kid to school, why not for a lot of people, not just kids, the vaccine for this disease?
Chris Wallace
Why are those mandates that parents in your state must comply with and do comply with routinelywhy is it that theyre not so objectionable and such a violation of personal freedom but Bidens vaccine mandates are? Wallace continued.
After the Republican governor responded that those other vaccines have a long history of use and that Americans dont know what to trust with the COVID-19 vaccines, Wallace pointed out that the polio vaccine was quickly mandated after it first became available and Americans viewed it as a blessing at the time.
Were in the middle of a pandemic, the Fox News Sunday moderator added. There is a new vaccine that Donald Trump was largely responsible for. Its been approvedfull approvalby the FDA. Again, if the polio vaccine is okay for parents and they have to comply with it to send their kid to school, why not for a lot of people, not just kids, the vaccine for this disease?
Ricketts asserted that the surging coronavirus pandemic is very different from polio before claiming that children are no more at risk for the coronavirus than they are the ordinary flu. He also noted that the majority of COVID-19 deaths in his state were among senior citizens, adding that most state residents over 65 have already been vaccinated.
Lazio, the Italian regionaround Rome, is to start administering the third dose of the covid-19 vaccine in the coming days.
"Lazio starts with the third dose of vaccine" - the region's president Nicola Zingaretti wrote on Twitter on Sunday evening - "From next week we will begin with those who have received a transplant."
The move comes days after health minister Roberto Speranza confirmed that the third jab would be given toItaly's"most frail patients" in September, such as cancer and transplant patients, before deciding to continue with the over-80s, nursing home residents and medical workers.
Last week Italy's coronavirus emergency commissioner Francesco Figliuolo said tthe country is on track to reach its target of having 80 per cent of the population over the age of 12 fully vaccinated by the end of September.
Lazio was set to achieve this target over the weekend, according to regional health councillor Alessio D'Amato, who told news agency ANSA on Wednesday that the region's next goal would be to reach 90 per cent vaccinated.
Photo credit: Alessia Pierdomenico / Shutterstock.com.
But those calls are running up against the FDAs caution and crucially a lack of safety and efficacy data. Regulators have already asked vaccine makers to increase the size of their pediatric clinical trials to increase the chances of detecting rare side effects. The first results from one of those studies, Pfizers, are not expected until later this month. And top federal health officials have said they dont expect a vaccine will be available for 5-to-11-year-olds until late fall or winter. Authorization for children as young as six months will come even later.
With cold weather approaching in much of the country, many parents and public health experts see a recipe for disaster. The change in seasons is likely to send more people indoors at a time when the highly contagious Delta variant is circulating and many cities and states have loosened or discarded public health mandates on mask wearing and social distancing.
While children are at a low risk, thankfully, compared to our adults, they arent at no risk meaning that we are seeing children in the hospital. We are hearing of deaths, said Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious disease professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Indeed, hospitalizations among children and teens quadrupled in August in states with low vaccination rates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released Friday. Hospital admissions for unvaccinated adolescents and for kids 4 and under have each risen tenfold since mid-June, when the Delta variant took hold in the U.S., CDC said.
And while children are less likely to develop severe Covid-19 or die from the virus, Newland said he expects the number of child deaths will rise as more kids are admitted to hospitals following the explosion in cases.
At the heart of the debate over Covid-19 vaccines for kids is the inescapable fact that children arent just little adults. Their immune systems are different than those of adults, and their bodies are smaller and still developing.
Those differences help explain why kids have been less likely than adults to have severe Covid-19, and have suffered rare side effects not seen in older people including the mysterious inflammatory syndrome called MIS-C, which can occur even after mild infections.
But pediatric specialists note that these differences mean that FDA cant lean on the results of vaccine trials in adults to authorize shots for children. Children often need lower doses of drugs than adults do, and they may also experience different and potentially more serious side effects.
Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna are studying their shots safety and efficacy in younger children and infants, with Pfizer expected to submit results of its 5-to-11-year-olds clinical trial to the FDA this month. Moderna has said its results wont be ready until closer to the end of the year. Both companies are also testing their shots in children as young as six months.
FDA asked the manufacturers in July to increase the size of their kids trials to try to better detect serious side effects like the heart inflammation known as myocarditis, which has surfaced in teens and young adults after vaccination with the Pfizer and Moderna shots. Its unclear whether the agencys request will affect the timing of the companies submissions.
But several doctors told POLITICO that increasing the number of trial participants wont do much to help vaccine makers and regulators identify rare side effects. They said a slightly larger trial size could help assuage parents concerned about the reports of myocarditis and other side effects in older teens.
But the generally low rates of adverse events post-Covid inoculation mean manufacturers likely wont be able to identify rare side effects during the kid trials. And that raises ethical questions about assigning some children enrolled in those trials to a placebo group when a highly transmissible strain of the virus is wreaking havoc nationwide.
Theres always a human price for knowledge, said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia who co-invented the vaccine for rotavirus, which can cause fatal diarrhea in young children.
Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Childrens Hospital, has urged a conservative approach to approving vaccines for kids, given the myocarditis cases in older teens and young adults and typically low rates of severe outcomes in children.
We want to have a vaccine, he said, but if it causes more problems than it solves if it causes more disease than it prevents I dont think theres a rush to get there.
Like Offit, Meissner is a member of the FDAs advisory committee on vaccination, which provides recommendations that the agency typically follows.
President Joe Biden and some members of his Covid task force have bullishly predicted that some children under 12 could be eligible for the shots this fall. But National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins recently suggested it could take longer for regulators to sign off on vaccinating older kids in that group, saying he doesnt see approval for kids 5 to 11 coming much before the end of 2021.
Peter Marks, the head of FDAs vaccine center, said last month it would take a few weeks at least to assess a vaccine manufacturers trial data before the agency issued an emergency use authorization to use a shot in children.
Even the American Academy of Pediatrics has urged the FDA to speed things up, arguing last month in a letter to acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock that the Delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis for authorizing vaccines in children. Regulators could authorize the shot for those older kids using already-available data from the initial group enrolled in clinical trials, AAP President Lee Savio Beers said, while continuing to track safety data from the expanded group
The number of children infected has increased exponentially since early summer, AAP said in its Monday update on child cases. Cases have risen fivefold over the past month, the group said, going from about 38,000 in mid-July to almost 204,000 last week.
Children have made up nearly 15 percent of total Covid cases since the pandemic began, AAP said. For the week ending Aug. 26, kids made up 22.4 percent of weekly cases.
Dozens of lawmakers from both parties asked Woodcock on Aug. 17 for a briefing on FDAs regulatory process for authorizing Covid vaccines for young children.
The beginning of the school year was a clear moment that could have been used to educate and disseminate vaccines, said the members, led by Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and Katie Porter. Now with a late summer surge, the reopening of schools seems likely to increase community spread.
Public health experts agree that children can return to school safely with a multilayered cocooning approach that involves requiring masks, spacing out desks and improving ventilation in classrooms, plus vaccinating the adults and teens in their orbit. But with whole swathes of the country eschewing mask and vaccine mandates, and in some cases prohibiting them, its unclear when the spike in childrens Covid cases will come down.
Polio had no friends," Offit said of the viral disease that paralyzed thousands of U.S. children in the 1940s and 1950s, and has since been eradicated domestically by vaccines. "This virus has a great many friends.
Credits
By Jordan Allen, Sarah Almukhtar, Aliza Aufrichtig, Anne Barnard, Matthew Bloch, Sarah Cahalan, Weiyi Cai, Julia Calderone, Keith Collins, Matthew Conlen, Lindsey Cook, Gabriel Gianordoli, Amy Harmon, Rich Harris, Adeel Hassan, Jon Huang, Danya Issawi, Danielle Ivory, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Alex Lemonides, Eleanor Lutz, Allison McCann, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Jugal K. Patel, Alison Saldanha, Kirk Semple, Shelly Seroussi, Julie Walton Shaver, Amy Schoenfeld Walker, Anjali Singhvi, Charlie Smart, Mitch Smith, Albert Sun, Rumsey Taylor, Lisa Waananen Jones, Derek Watkins, Timothy Williams, Jin Wu and Karen Yourish. Reporting was contributed by Jeff Arnold, Ian Austen, Mike Baker, Brillian Bao, Ellen Barry, Samone Blair, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Aurelien Breeden, Elisha Brown, Emma Bubola, Maddie Burakoff, Alyssa Burr, Christopher Calabrese, Julia Carmel, Zak Cassel, Robert Chiarito, Izzy Coln, Matt Craig, Yves De Jesus, Brendon Derr, Brandon Dupr, Melissa Eddy, John Eligon, Timmy Facciola, Bianca Fortis, Jake Frankenfield, Matt Furber, Robert Gebeloff, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Matthew Goldstein, Grace Gorenflo, Rebecca Griesbach, Benjamin Guggenheim, Barbara Harvey, Lauryn Higgins, Josh Holder, Jake Holland, Anna Joyce, John Keefe, Ann Hinga Klein, Jacob LaGesse, Alex Lim, Alex Matthews, Patricia Mazzei, Jesse McKinley, Miles McKinley, K.B. Mensah, Sarah Mervosh, Jacob Meschke, Lauren Messman, Andrea Michelson, Jaylynn Moffat-Mowatt, Steven Moity, Paul Moon, Derek M. Norman, Anahad OConnor, Ashlyn OHara, Azi Paybarah, Elian Peltier, Sean Plambeck, Laney Pope, Elisabetta Povoledo, Cierra S. Queen, Savannah Redl, Scott Reinhard, Chloe Reynolds, Thomas Rivas, Frances Robles, Natasha Rodriguez, Jess Ruderman, Kai Schultz, Alex Schwartz, Emily Schwing, Libby Seline, Rachel Sherman, Sarena Snider, Brandon Thorp, Alex Traub, Maura Turcotte, Tracey Tully, Jeremy White, Kristine White, Bonnie G. Wong, Tiffany Wong, Sameer Yasir and John Yoon. Data acquisition and additional work contributed by Will Houp, Andrew Chavez, Michael Strickland, Tiff Fehr, Miles Watkins, Josh Williams, Nina Pavlich, Carmen Cincotti, Ben Smithgall, Andrew Fischer, Rachel Shorey, Blacki Migliozzi, Alastair Coote, Jaymin Patel, John-Michael Murphy, Isaac White, Steven Speicher, Hugh Mandeville, Robin Berjon, Thu Trinh, Carolyn Price, James G. Robinson, Phil Wells, Yanxing Yang, Michael Beswetherick, Michael Robles, Nikhil Baradwaj, Ariana Giorgi, Bella Virgilio, Dylan Momplaisir, Avery Dews, Bea Malsky, Ilana Marcus and Jason Kao.
Additional contributions to Covid-19 risk assessments and guidance by Eleanor Peters Bergquist, Aaron Bochner, Shama Cash-Goldwasser, Sydney Jones and Sheri Kardooni of Resolve to Save Lives.
Please see the weekly report below.
Consultation and support of any students and employees with potential COVID-19 symptoms or exposures continues.
Report Date: Sept. 10, 2021
1Student, employee, or other is currently living/learning/working on campus.2Student, employee, or other is currently living/learning/working off campus.
Please Note:
*Per health and safety guidelines, and in consultation with the Scott County Health Department (SCHD), all individuals testing positive are in isolation. Isolation is used to separate people infected with the virus (those who are symptomatic and those with no symptoms) from people who are not infected.
*The St. Ambrose Case Managers conduct contact tracing and make further recommendations for testing or quarantine of others according to their exposure. Quarantine is used to keep someone who might have been exposed to COVID-19 away from others.
*Faculty, staff, and students total approximately 3,600 at St. Ambrose University in Fall 2021.
1County and State Data Source: Public Health Ad Hoc Advisory SitRep
On Wednesday, Sept. 8, the first known Texas A&M student was reported to have died due to complications from COVID-19.
Biomedical sciences sophomore Kirstyn Katherine Ahuero was from Glen Rose, where she was the valedictorian of her high school class, according to an obituary published by Kerrville Funeral Home.
Ahuero is the first known current student at A&M to die of COVID-19.
As of Sept. 9, A&Ms COVID-19 Dashboard reported 1,577 active cases self-reported among university faculty, students and staff. This number was an increase of 948 active cases since Aug. 27, two weeks prior, or a 60 percent increase.
University officials issued a statement to The Eagle Saturday morning, which said the Aggie family is mourning her death.
"Her desire to become a psychiatric nurse was a true calling to serve those in greatest need," the statement to The Eagle said.
The Battalion has reached out to the university for comment.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. As the weekend comes to a close, Arkansas sees yet another day of declines in total hospitalizations.
Sadly, another 35 Arkansans died in the last 24 hours from the virus, moving the states pandemic total to 7,267.
According to the figures from the Arkansas Department of Health, hospitalizations fell for the fifth straight day, down by 13 to 1,118 patients admitted due to COVID-19.
Since Wednesday, Sept. 8, Arkansas has seen total hospitalizations drop by 110. Information as to whether those numbers are due to deaths or recoveries was not available.
The number of patients on ventilators also went down by 5, putting the number at 287 in the state.
The ADH reported 1,116 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday. The total number of active cases is 19,588, a drop of 265 from the previous day.
There were 5,188 COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the past day.
There are currently 1,279,526 Arkansans fully immunized from the virus, an increase of 3,331, with another 314,645 residents having partial immunity.
The number of deaths in Arkansas due to COVID-19 are now more than the population of Trumann, Ark., which has a population of 7,243 the 50th largest municipality of the 496 in the state.
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The coronavirus struck nearly 20 years after the terror attacks in the United States on 9/11 and in a drastically different manner: slowly at first and essentially invisible, a far cry from the explosions after airliners slammed into Manhattans Twin Towers with the scene immediately beamed worldwide.
But the two crises which will likely shape generations of New Jerseyans share certain commonalities when it comes to public health. Both disasters prompted unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression, especially for those intimately involved in the response, experts note, and are likely to have long-lasting impacts on individuals, families and communities.
Both 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic have led people to view the responders firefighters and emergency medical personnel then, and nurses, doctors and other caregivers today as heroes, a term experts acknowledge can be good and bad. Sometimes the hero label can prevent these responders from seeking help for their own mental health or substance abuse issues, clinicians said, and those who endured 9/11 may find it even harder to handle with the pandemic stress of today.
If you are dealing already with mental health issues, anything pre-existing, you dont bode well if there is some kind of major trauma, explained Jodi Streich, mental health director for the World Trade Center Clinical Center of Excellence at Rutgers University, one of a network of federal programs set up in the wake of the terrorist attacks to assist responders and others who experienced health issues as a result of their time at ground zero.
The health care workers are now our first responders, Streich said, and they face a similar strain as those who rushed in to save lives when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
First responders of all kinds are sometimes less willing to seek help when they need it, experts note, which creates an additional challenge. This is a very hard population to take care of because they are people who take care of other people and are not used to taking care of themselves, added Dr. Iris Udasin, the centers medical director.
Streich said that while the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered significant stress for health care providers and the public, individuals who have a history of post-traumatic stress disorder like the centers 9/11 patients are particularly at risk for a relapse. All of us are noticing as clinicians, and just as human beings, the heightened irritability and anger among people, she said. And for those with PTSD, Its a whole new, re-awaking of the previous trauma.
Udasin, a professor at Rutgers School of Public Health, said the center contacted its more than 2,000 patients to check on their well-being during the pandemic, which proved fatal for some. Many 9/11 survivors struggle with lung damage, she said, symptoms of which can mask the appearance of COVID-19 and make them more vulnerable to infection and serious illness.
Many of our patients were short of breath already, Udasin said. I lost a few patients to COVID who thought it was asthma or COPD. Another died of suicide, caused in part by the isolation resulting from the pandemic lockdown, she said.
COVID-19 has killed more than 650,000 people nationwide, including some 27,000 in New Jersey, where more than 1.1 million residents have been diagnosed with the disease since it first emerged in March 2020, state statistics show. Since then, COVID-19 has caused nearly 90,000 New Jerseyans to be hospitalized, and case counts and hospital admissions continue to tick upward with the growing presence of highly transmissible variants of the coronavirus.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks including 750 New Jerseyans and some 6,000 more were injured. But the death toll from that crisis continues to mount, as thousands more have since succumbed to cancer, lung damage or other illnesses linked to toxins emitted from the smoldering pile of debris at ground zero, which was the site of a rescue and recovery mission that lasted nine months.
The disparities in total fatalities hint at how the pandemics impact may eventually overshadow that of 9/11. The coronavirus was a tragedy for everyone. Nine-eleven was an assault on all of the United States, but if you lived in Nebraska you felt sad about 9/11 but you werent exposed to the toxins if you lived in Nebraska, Udasin said.
But there are clearly commonalities too. People are still dying from both. I think thats one parallel, said Steve Cicala, a founding member of the New Jersey Emergency Management Task Force, which was created in the wake of 9/11 to help coordinate the states response to mass-casualty events. Cicala lost his wife, a nurse, to COVID-19 in April 2020.
Despite the different nature of these two catastrophic events, the response to 9/11 has informed how New Jersey reacted to the pandemic, according to those involved. The EMS task force a nonprofit that is available to help coordinate large, multijurisdictional emergency responses itself is an example of that process, members said. And its work evolves more with each crisis or incident, with members learning from every hurricane, train crash or other big event, Cicala explained.
Before 9/11, EMS was a loosely knit group of agencies. There really was no connective tissue, recalled Mickey McCabe, another founding task force member who also runs a private ambulance company in Bayonne he started in 1973. McCabe recalled his struggle to effectively deploy assistance to ground zero from among the 200 ambulance units that had showed up on their own at Liberty State Park that day, all determined to help despite the lack of a coordinated plan.
Members said that since then the task force has used grants and other funding to acquire resources that were beyond the reach of local responders. The list includes ambulances with extensive medical equipment that can transport 20 prone patients at once, mini-ambulances for off-road use, and a unit that can refill multiple oxygen tanks at once. Its grown from a loose-fitting group with a vision, and we started to knit together a patchwork and make it work, McCabe said.
Part of the task forces evolution has involved working with local responders to create action plans that can help guide decisions in a crisis. As a result, the task force now has plans for some 15 different scenarios from dealing with tropical weather to performing water rescues to evacuating hospitals that give them a head start when disaster hits.
But all plans, including pandemic plans created by the task force, should be considered a starting point and need adjustment in real time, responders said. A COVID-19 response framework drafted by state officials was essentially abandoned when the pandemics requirements quickly outpaced the response outlined on paper.
These plans are really guidelines, said Lou Sasso, another task force leader who also serves as Middlesex Countys emergency response coordinator. These situations are always a little bit different and require flexibility, he said. But with bright people, the right resources and the right plans, thats how you make things work.
The state Department of Health also worked to beef up various preparedness programs after 9/11. Department spokesperson Dawn Thomas said federal funding was used to augment the capabilities of 22 local health departments that now serve as a coordinated public health network.
One of the lasting impacts was foundation building building and sustaining relationships with healthcare systems and local health departments, particularly in regard to preparedness, Thomas said. The alliances have continued, she noted, allowing the state to funnel additional federal funds to local hospitals for emergency preparedness needs.
The work of the EMS task force has also benefited from the relationships members have built over the decades with local responders and community groups. The groups connection to state officials has also strengthened significantly in recent years, providing new opportunities to support larger public health efforts, which became critical during the pandemic.
In March 2020 task force members helped state officials set up the massive, drive-through COVID-19 testing sites. Weeks later, the team was called in to evacuate dozens of frail elderly residents from the St. Josephs Senior Home in Woodbridge, which had been overrun by COVID-19 infections. The group worked with state officials and local providers to create pop-up vaccination sites at the Jersey Shore this past Memorial Day. By June, the organization had taken on the near-daily responsibility of distributing vaccine doses from a storage facility in Mercer County to vaccination sites throughout the state.
Weve become sort of the tip of the spear in some respects for the state Department of Health, Sasso said, enabling the state to quickly expand testing or vaccination capacity in communities hard-hit by COVID-19. Weve become their boots on the ground when it comes to public health.
Task force members are pleased with the groups progress and McCabe said he is proud of how EMS response has evolved to become more coordinated in New Jersey, which is known for its fierce commitment to local, or home rule. I think we are far ahead of where we were on Sept. 10, 2001, Cicala said. We have come a long way and we are more prepared now than we ever were.
However, there is always a need for additional funding, members said. New communication equipment is high on the list of needs, Sasso said, and it isnt cheap. Updating and maintaining what we have [is the priority]; if we could enhance it, even better, he said.
Udasin, from the Rutgers World Trade Center clinical program, said there is also a need for greater investment in mental health care. Access to treatment has improved over the years, she said, but insurance coverage for behavioral health care remains sub-par. And for some there is still a stigma around asking for help with psychological issues, she explained.
Thats one lesson we should take out of this crisis, Udasin said. It took a long time to make the treatment of mental health as accessible as physical health [treatment] in our world. And as a world, we need to collectively treat mental health better, to treat peoples fears better.
Streich, the mental health director at the same Rutgers program, said people also need to understand that it can take time before survivors are ready to discuss a trauma with others. It took a while for some of the World Trade Center first responders to accept mental health help, she said, and it may be the same for those now on the pandemics front lines.
Thats the thing with PTSD, youre not going to see it right at the moment, Streich said. But I do think its coming. Especially for all those who are burnt out and havent allowed themselves to deal with the current situation.
In that way, both 9/11 and the pandemic are likely to share a sad and lasting legacy. Thats the thing with mental health: Its permanent, Streich said. Treatment can save and improve lives greatly, she said, but you dont get over the problem. Its really always there.
Vaccinated people who are infected with COVID-19 and get a so-called breakthrough case that leads to severe illness are more likely to be older and have preexisting health conditions, a new study found.
"Overall, older population with underlying heart or lung disease, or with weakened immune system were the most highly represented in those with breakthrough cases with symptoms," Dr. Hyung Chun of the Yale School of Medicine, who led the study, wrote in an email.
Chun and his Yale colleagues identified 969 patient who were admitted to hospitals in the Yale New Haven Health System and who tested positive for COVID across a 14-day period from March 23 to July 1, according to commentary posted on the Lancet Infectious Disease website on Sept. 7.All patients were required to get tested when they were admitted and may have come to the hospital for illness other than COVID.
Roughly 18% of the patients who tested positive received at least one vaccine dose and a third of these were fully vaccinated, records showed.
The team focused on those fully vaccinated people and found a quarter of them (14 people) had severe or critical disease and required supplementary oxygen support. Four were in the intensive care unit, one on a mechanical ventilator and three died.
The patients with severe disease ranged in age from 65 to 95 years old and had a median age of 80.5, the researchers said. They had preexisting comorbidities including cardiovascular disease, lung disease, obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Some patients were on immunosuppressive drugs that may impact vaccine efficacy.
A large body of research shows COVID-19 vaccines are effective and have been instrumental in curbing the pandemic, but in rare cases people who are fully vaccinated contract the virus and get what are called breakthrough cases. In even rarer cases, a breakthrough case results in severe illness.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has received reports of 14,115 patients with COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infection who were hospitalized or died. This accounts for an extremely small percentage of the 178 million fully vaccinated individuals in the United States.
"Vaccines continue to remain highly effective in preventing severe illness due to COVID-19," Chun wrote. "The likelihood of developing severe COVID-19 infection remains far lower for those vaccinated compared to those unvaccinated. Emerging data on breakthrough cases will need to be closely followed to determine the most effective strategies for booster vaccines."
The study was done before the highly transmissible delta variant became the predominant COVID variant in the United States. Chun said more research is needed to determine the impact of the delta variant on breakthrough cases.
