The C.D.C. won’t investigate all post-vaccine infections, just those that result in hospitalizations or deaths. Federal health officials have stopped investigating breakthrough coronavirus infections in vaccinated people unless the cases cause serious disease that leads to a hospitalization or a death.
The Centers for Disease Control, which announced its decision earlier this month, will continue to gather data about mild breakthrough cases that are reported to the agency voluntarily by local health departments, but will only investigate the most serious cases of breakthrough infections — about one in 10. Until May, the agency was monitoring all cases.
A report issued Tuesday said that as of the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the agency had received 10,261 reports of breakthrough infections from 46 states and territories, a figure it said was probably a “substantial undercount.” Of those, 995 people were known to have been hospitalized, and 160 had died, though not all as a direct result of Covid-19, the new study said. Although the agency will continue to carry out vaccine effectiveness studies, it will focus on specific populations like health care workers, essential workers, the elderly and residents of long-term care facilities, a C.D.C. spokeswoman said.
Some scientists have criticized the retrenchment, saying it is wasting an opportunity to learn about the real-world effectiveness of different vaccines and to pick up on when vaccine protection begins to wane, whether variants play a significant role in breakthrough infections, and whether some patients are more susceptible than others to a post-vaccine infection. “We are driving blind, and we will miss a lot of signals,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who spent many years as a senior scientist at the C.D.C. “The C.D.C. is a surveillance agency,” Dr. Mokdad said. “How can you do surveillance and pick one number and not look at the whole?”
But other scientists said they support the C.D.C.’s pivot to concentrate on the most serious cases. “We have to prioritize what we’re doing, and the priority is to understand the cases associated with severe disease,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a professor of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine who studies vaccine safety and effectiveness. Some people who were infected with the virus when they thought they were protected by the vaccine are troubled by the lack of interest in their cases. “Don’t people want to know about this?” asked Julie Cohn, a 43-year-old mother from Short Hills NJ., who was infected after she was fully vaccinated, and is still suffering lingering effects of Covid-19 nearly two months later. “Where do people like me go? What happens next? The practitioners in my life have been shocked and are trying to figure out how to move forward, but there are so many questions. And if no one is studying this, there won’t be answers.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/25/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask.amp.html
The Centers for Disease Control, which announced its decision earlier this month, will continue to gather data about mild breakthrough cases that are reported to the agency voluntarily by local health departments, but will only investigate the most serious cases of breakthrough infections — about one in 10. Until May, the agency was monitoring all cases.
A report issued Tuesday said that as of the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the agency had received 10,261 reports of breakthrough infections from 46 states and territories, a figure it said was probably a “substantial undercount.” Of those, 995 people were known to have been hospitalized, and 160 had died, though not all as a direct result of Covid-19, the new study said. Although the agency will continue to carry out vaccine effectiveness studies, it will focus on specific populations like health care workers, essential workers, the elderly and residents of long-term care facilities, a C.D.C. spokeswoman said.
Some scientists have criticized the retrenchment, saying it is wasting an opportunity to learn about the real-world effectiveness of different vaccines and to pick up on when vaccine protection begins to wane, whether variants play a significant role in breakthrough infections, and whether some patients are more susceptible than others to a post-vaccine infection. “We are driving blind, and we will miss a lot of signals,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who spent many years as a senior scientist at the C.D.C. “The C.D.C. is a surveillance agency,” Dr. Mokdad said. “How can you do surveillance and pick one number and not look at the whole?”
But other scientists said they support the C.D.C.’s pivot to concentrate on the most serious cases. “We have to prioritize what we’re doing, and the priority is to understand the cases associated with severe disease,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a professor of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine who studies vaccine safety and effectiveness. Some people who were infected with the virus when they thought they were protected by the vaccine are troubled by the lack of interest in their cases. “Don’t people want to know about this?” asked Julie Cohn, a 43-year-old mother from Short Hills NJ., who was infected after she was fully vaccinated, and is still suffering lingering effects of Covid-19 nearly two months later. “Where do people like me go? What happens next? The practitioners in my life have been shocked and are trying to figure out how to move forward, but there are so many questions. And if no one is studying this, there won’t be answers.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/25/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask.amp.html
