It wasn’t supposed to happen. As breakthrough COVID-19 cases continue to mount in Massachusetts, 100 people who were fully vaccinated, but got COVID anyway, have died.
When the vaccines were introduced, and as they’ve been sold across the country and around the world, a major sales pitch for getting vaccinated has been that if you get the shot, even if you do happen to get COVID, you won’t be as sick as you would be if you catch a natural infection, and you won’t be hospitalized, and you certainly won’t die.
As it turns out, that simply wasn’t true. Even as late as July 27, 2021, the CDC was putting out bulletins saying that the vaccines “are both efficacious and effective against symptomatic, laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, including severe forms of the disease” and that “vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization and death is high for all current SARS-CoV-2 variants.”
Just three days later, though, NBC News reported that at least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans had so far come down with COVID despite being vaccinated, and that 1,400 of those breakthrough cases had died.
August 5, 2021, the CDC added a bulletin on its website encouraging health providers to report vaccine breakthrough cases and deaths, acknowledging that “breakthrough cases are expected” and that “there will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized or die from COVID-19.”
Although Massachusetts health officials stressed that the number of breakthrough case deaths are very low, at 0.002%, they don’t mention that the overall fatality for a natural infection is also very low, at 0.26%.
SOURCES:
Boston.com August 10, 2021
U.S. CDC July 27, 2021
NBC News July 30, 2021
U.S. CDC August 5, 2021
Annals of Internal Medicine January 2021