Cape Town – While reports have emerged of fully vaccinated people becoming infected with Covid-19, health experts say these cases are to be expected.
Speaking during a media briefing on government efforts in the fight against Covid-19 and the national vaccination roll-out programme, this morning co-principal investigator of the Sisonke implementation study, Professor Glenda Gray said about 96% of these breakthrough cases are mild.
Gray said “We do see breakthrough infections and these all happen to be mild. Around 96% breakthrough infections are mild in health-care workers and in terms of severe and death there’s been less than 0.005%.”
“The Johnson and Johnson (J&J) vaccine is safe; there's been no safety we detected in this cohort of people. The side effects we are seeing are in line with what's seen globally. We have seen two rare blood clot events occurred among trial participants, but both cases have fully recovered and will continue to evaluate (J&J) vaccine for a further 2 years,” she said.
In looking at the effectiveness of the J&J vaccine, Gray said they used three data sets, two came from medical insurances, one came from the Western Cape persal database.
According to Gray, the data they have shows there is good durability for the protection that the J&J jab provides.
“Protection from hospitalisation was 65% after 28 days of vaccination and the same after 120 days of vaccination. At this stage, no booster shot is required,” she said.
Gray said more data from the study will be available at the end of August about how long the protection of the jab lasts.