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HomeHealthStudy indicates Alpha variant could be causing higher breakthrough infections than expected

Study indicates Alpha variant could be causing higher breakthrough infections than expected

Researchers said the healthcare workers with breakthrough infections had mild symptoms but high viral loads & were shedding the virus up to 32 days after diagnosis.

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New Delhi: The B.1.1.7 or the Alpha variant caused a higher number of breakthrough infections than expected among healthcare workers in Germany who had received the Pfizer vaccine, a new study has found.

Breakthrough infections refer to infections among fully-vaccinated individuals.

In a small study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday, researchers looked at 1,137 health care workers who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) mRNA vaccine.

Of these, four women (0.35 per cent) had breakthrough infections. Three of them had been tested for Covid because unvaccinated individuals in their household had symptoms while one person tested positive during the hospital’s routine screening.

According to the researchers, this failure rate is higher than what had been seen in phase 3 trials of the vaccine, where 0.05 per cent of the vaccinated participants had a breakthrough infection, seven or more days after receiving the second dose.

In the phase 3 trials of the Pfizer vaccine, out of the 21,720 participants who received the BNT162b2 vaccine, eight people got Covid-19 at least seven days after the second dose.

The team also noted that the healthcare workers with breakthrough infections had mild symptoms but high viral loads. They were also shedding the virus up to 32 days after diagnosis.

All the breakthrough infections were classified as the B.1.1.7 (or Alpha) variant, which was first identified in South Africa.

The study concludes that vaccinated health care workers can be infected with variants of concern, and also transmit SARS-CoV-2 in the hospital if not screened early enough.

As new variants of the coronavirus continue to emerge, studies have found that some vaccines are less effective against emerging variants.

The researchers caution that variants of concern may not only be more transmissible than the original SARS-CoV-2 but may also escape vaccine protection more frequently.

(Edited by Rachel John)


Also read: Delta variant the main culprit in India’s breakthrough Covid infections, study says


 

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