COVID-19 Vaccines Are More Than 90% Effective: What That Means

• People who get COVID-19 after vaccination represent about 1/100th of 1 percent of those who’ve been inoculated.
• Experts say this is because although the vaccines are highly protective, they’re not 100 percent effective.
• They add that people who do become sick after getting vaccinated have a far lower chance of being hospitalized.

The fact that vaccinated people can still get COVID-19 should not be a surprise.

And it’s certainly no reason not to get vaccinated.

“Breakthrough” cases of COVID-19 among vaccinated people are expected.

It doesn’t mean that the vaccines currently in use are not highly effective.

They are.

They’re just not 100 percent effective.

So, yes, you can still get sick even if you’re vaccinated, but it’s exceedingly rare.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 87 million Americans had received the COVID-19 vaccine as of April 20, 2021. Among vaccinated people, there were 7,157 breakthrough cases, with fewer than 500 hospitalizations and 88 deaths.

Do the math and you can see the cases are about 1/100th of 1 percent of those vaccinated.

“The effectiveness of any vaccine in preventing serious illness is high, and in the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, it’s very high,” Dr. S. Wesley Long, an infectious disease researcher and clinical microbiologist at Houston Methodist in Texas, told Healthline.

“All the data shows that if you’re vaccinated you probably won’t get any symptoms at all, but even if you do, you still probably won’t get full-blown COVID and end up in the hospital,” he said.