I was fully vaccinated and still got corona – here’s why

Health officials have expressed concern that people who received the vaccine are relying too much on their immunity, removing masks and returning to some of their pre-pandemic habits. And the result can be infection.

But, one week after completing the vaccination program, shouldn’t people be immune to the coronavirus?

There are several reasons why someone may develop COVID-19 after vaccination, according to Prof. Jonathan Gershoni, from the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, Tel Aviv University.

The first is that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are only about 95% effective, which means that 5% of people are likely to contract the coronavirus even after being fully vaccinated.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed based on the original coronavirus strain as discovered and genetically sequenced in Wuhan, China. Since then, the virus has replicated and mutated in thousands of different variants, some of which may make the vaccine less effective.

“We know in Israel that now most infections are from the UK variant,” said Gershoni.

Although these vaccines have already been shown to be reasonably effective against the South African variant and even more so against the UK variant, they are not as effective as against the first strain, he said. The Jerusalem Post. In addition, there may be other variants that are even more resistant to the vaccine.

Another reason is that immunity is “a numbers game,” he said.

The disease or the vaccine causes our bodies to develop antibodies against the virus. But if someone has an extremely high viral load and gets rid of that potent load, it is possible that this large amount of virus will break the existing protection and infect the person. In that case, it would probably cause only a mild illness.

Finally, each person is unique and has its own molecular immunological composition.

“We know that some people have a tendency to be very robust and resist infections, and others may be a little more sensitive,” said Gershoni. “When speaking in terms of vaccinating five million people in Israel, you are looking at the entire spectrum of people with varying levels of immune competence.”

But he warned that when we talk about “emerging infections”, sometimes people were infected before they received the second or even the first dose.

In addition, those who contract the coronavirus after vaccination rarely suffer from a severe version of the disease.

“You have to put it in perspective,” said Gershoni. “Those who are infected are not normally subject to devastating illness and death.”

This claim that vaccination represents the majority of advances as a mild disease is supported by the latest data from the Ministry of Health, which was released to the Post. The data showed that of the 3,387,340 people who were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus (two doses plus seven days), only 4,711 contracted the virus, or less than 0.2%.

Of these, only 907 people had any symptoms, including 429 who were hospitalized, among them 271 who developed a severe case of the disease.

About 99 people died after being fully vaccinated.

Gershoni compared the vaccine to the Iron Dome, which protected the country from thousands of rockets and missiles, but still lost some.