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Virus expert warns: This is what you must do to avoid COVID after vaccination! How to reduce the risk of breakthrough infection!
As COVID continues to circulate in the world, unvaccinated people are still at the highest risk of getting sick. According to the health department, vaccinated people have a much lower overall risk of being hospitalized or dying because of the virus compared to the unvaccinated. However, even though vaccine protection against severe COVID viruses remains strong, its ability to fully ward off infection has diminished over time and in the face of increasingly transmissible variants, leading to a breakthrough in COVID cases. According to the CDC, more than 100 fully vaccinated people per 100,000 people contracted COVID in August and September. However, that doesn’t mean vaccinated people can’t do something right now to increase their protection. Experts have this, simple tip!
This tip is from experts
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To better prevent these breakthrough infections, experts recommend that all fully vaccinated adults get a booster shot now. This is in contrast to the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which only allow certain Pfizer and Moderna recipients at higher risk to receive a booster shot.
“If you want to avoid symptomatic infection and long COVID and you’re between the ages of 18 and 39, you should get a booster shot,” Dr. Eric Topol, cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in a Nov. 17 interview on the NPR program All Things Considered.
For older people, there are additional reasons to get that third vaccination. “If you’re 40 and older and want to avoid hospitalization and death in addition to symptomatic infection, you should get a booster,” Topol said.
Many warn!
Topol is not the first virus expert in the U.S. to issue this warning. On November 9, Francis Collins, MD, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published a blog post urging fully vaccinated people to get the booster shot. Collins referenced real-world data from Israel, where researchers studied more than 4.7 million fully vaccinated Israeli adults, more than 13,000 of whom had breakthrough infections in July, and found a clear correlation between the rate of confirmed infections and the amount of time that had passed since vaccination.
“While the delta variant has certainly played a role in the resurgence of COVID-19 in recent months, these results suggest that waning immunity is also an important factor,” Collins explained. “These data were a key factor in the Israeli Ministry of Health’s decision in July 2021 to approve the administration of COVID-19 booster vaccines to individuals who had been vaccinated at least five months previously.”
But while Collins urged people to follow the CDC’s instructions, several states are no longer waiting for an official recommendation to expand booster vaccinations. According to U.S. News & World Report, at least 15 states have decided to expand booster vaccination to adults before the CDC and FDA: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and Utah.
Dr. Fauci warns of increased risk!
These decisions come at a time when the top COVID adviser in the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently warned of an increased risk of contracting COVID despite being fully vaccinated this winter. “Breakthrough infections are going to happen, and they’re going to happen at an even greater rate than they do now among those who have been vaccinated,” Fauci said in a pre-recorded interview that aired on STAT Summit on November 16, 2021 (ABC News).
According to Fauci, booster shots for all adults may be more important than we first thought, so much so that he said it’s likely that a third shot with an mRNA vaccine “should be part of the current standard of care.” This is especially wise since, according to the infectious disease expert, breakthrough infections are already leading to serious consequences in those who are not vaccinated.
“What we’re starting to see now is an increase in hospitalizations in people who have been vaccinated but not boosted,” Fauci said in a separate interview with NBC News on Nov. 17. “That’s a significant proportion, but it’s far from the majority”.
On All Things Considered, NPR reporter Will Stone added that virus experts like Topol now say that booster shots for all adults aren’t just about preventing hospitalizations – though that’s an added benefit. Instead, preventing breakthrough infections may be important enough.
“The booster shots can do more than [prevent hospitalizations],” Stone said. “It’s also another way for people to get additional protection, especially if they live in a place where vaccination rates are low and masking is optional.”