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

Health officials have expressed concern that people who receive the vaccine are becoming overconfident in their immunity, removing their masks and resuming some of their pre-pandemic habits. And the result could be an infection.

But a week after completing the vaccination program, aren’t people supposed to be immune to the coronavirus?

There are several reasons why one could develop COVID-19 after vaccination, according to Professor Jonathan Gershoni of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at Tel Aviv University.

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

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

“We know in Israel that now the majority of infections are from the British variant,” Gershoni said.

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

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

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

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

“We know that some people tend to be very hardy and resist infection, and other people can be a bit more susceptible,” Gershoni said. “When you talk about vaccinating five million people in Israel, you see the whole spectrum of people with different levels of immune competence.”

But he warned that when we talk about “breakthrough infections,” people sometimes got infected before they got their second dose or even their first.

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

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

This claim that vaccination constitutes most breakthroughs as a mild illness is supported by the latest data from the Department of Health, which was released in the mail. Data showed that of the 3,387,340 people who were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus (two doses plus seven days), only 4,711 caught the virus, or less than 0.2%.

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

Some 99 people have died after being fully immunized.

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