Alberto Fernández with COVID-19: the debate is reopened on whether vaccinated people can be infected and how long the period of immunity lasts

The positive for COVID-19 which was known today Saturday after midnight and which IPresident Alberto Fernández himself reported via his Twitter account it almost answers a question that even world science could not yet answer: lthe possibility that a person could contract coronavirus despite being vaccinated. The Argentine president had received the two corresponding doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, formulated with two different adenoviruses.

It should be noted that for these hours the confirmation of his positive is still lacking, which will provide the PCR test whose result is still awaited. And two questions also persist: it remains to be confirmed, through a genomic study, whether he was infected with the same original variant of SARS-COV-2 or by the new strains circulating in the country -Manaos, United Kingdom , Rio de Janeiro – as well as the amount of antibodies generated during vaccination.

On his birthday, in the afternoon, Fernández first felt a headache and then had a slight fever -37.3-, fatigue and depression; which promptly prompted the consultation of his personal physician, Dr Federico Saavedra. Everything indicates that the President, in his capacity as a vaccinee, will treat the COVID-19 disease as a benign condition, being safe from possible hospitalization and, above all, from becoming a severe patient or requiring intensive treatment.

As he could know Infobae through the Presidential Medical Unit, Until the close of this memo, the President was in good clinical health, due to the positive result of the rapid antigen test. The Presidential Medical Unit will prepare for your isolation, your cardiac blood pressure will be monitored, and you will undergo a pulmonary assessment. It has also emerged that his neurological health will be monitored to control what is known as, among the post-COVID sequelae, mental fog.

From the presidential environment, special emphasis has been placed on highlighting that the effectiveness of the vaccine Fernández received – Sputnik V – like the rest “is primarily against the severity of the disease, reducing mortality. They are not a shield to prevent contagion, but the disease is transmitted in a light way, as with the flu. The vaccine did not fail, but rather makes the transit mild or moderate and that mortality remains at low levels to zero.“.

Reinfection and vaccinated

Just days ago, in a statement that sparked worldwide interest, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, celebrated the fact that those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19, for the most part, “they are not carriers of the virus”. But, given the doubts that such a statement has aroused among the scientific community, CDC clarified that it is possible that some fully vaccinated people could contract COVID-19. The evidence is not clear whether they can transmit the virus to other people. We continue to assess the evidence. “

For the Argentinian infectologist and vaccine expert, Roberto Debbag, “cases of infection after vaccination they are rare but do occur. This can happen after the first dose or after the second ”. In this way, post-vaccination care with social distance and mask becomes essential, ”he explained. Infobae.

Vaccines can cause two main types of immunity. On the one hand, “effective immunity”, which can prevent a pathogen from causing serious disease, but cannot prevent it from entering the body or making more copies of itself. And, on the other, the sterilizing immunity, which can prevent infection and even prevent asymptomatic cases. Ideally, a vaccine can produce sterilizing immunity.

Expert look

Regarding reinfection and vaccination, the infectious disease specialist Eduardo López assured Infobae that “it will all depend on how many doses of a vaccine a person has received, the specific type of vaccine and how many days have passed since application. If you give yourself the vaccine today, for the first 14 days, you can get infected because you still don’t have antibodies. The effectiveness of Sputnik V, for example, begins after 10 days. In studies, the AstraZeneca vaccine after the first dose, during the first four weeks, was not found to be more than 50% effective. Even after the second dose, it does not exceed 70% ”.

“The vaccine protects against severe forms of the disease. This does not prevent 100% contagion. For this reason, we say that the vaccine is one more element of protection against the virus and we must continue to take care of ourselves.“Said infectologist Lautaro de Vedia, former president of the Argentine Society of Infectology, consulted by this means.

The possibility of contracting the disease moderately even after being inoculated is a topic that has been discussed in the scientific community. Is that, Despite the progress of vaccination campaigns around the world, reports have spread of fully vaccinated people contracting COVID-19, as happened with the president.

For example, at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Southwestern Medical Center, four of 8,121 employees vaccinated with both doses were found to be infected. Another study found that seven of 14,990 workers at UC San Diego Salud and the University of California’s David Geffen School of Medicine tested positive after being inoculated with Moderna or Pfizer. Both results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Only some of the healthcare workers who tested positive for COVID-19 in the California study had symptoms, and these tended to be mild..

The debate continues and there is still no consensus among scientists around the world that current research is far from sufficient to say that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus.

The case of the President of the Argentine Republic reaffirms the scientific questions for which there is still no definitive answer among the vaccines available against COVID-19 -without distinction of technological platforms, whether it is genomic messenger RNA or those formulated with adenoviruses such as Sputnik V or AstraZeneca- about the duration of protection or the so-called period of immunity on the inoculate.

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