Some 35,000 vaccinated Americans are getting infected with COVID-19 every week, according to a recent estimate from a top U.S. health agency.
While the COVID-19 vaccines reduce the incidence of disease, hospitalization, and death, approximately 0.02 percent of Americans who are vaccinated against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus have still been contracting it on a weekly basis, according to the estimate.
The estimate was part of an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) presentation obtained and published by The Washington Post.
The CDC confirmed to The Epoch Times that the presentation was authentic.
COVID-19 cases among vaccinated Americans are known as breakthrough cases. The CDC stopped publicly reporting the number of breakthrough cases on May 1, except for those that result in hospitalization or death.
The last count the agency released was 10,262 through April 30. But that was an acknowledged undercount, because the case numbers came from voluntary reporting from states and territories. Some states didn’t submit any numbers.
The CDC has come under fire this week for recommending vaccinated persons wear masks, an abrupt shift from under three months ago, without being able to point to published data to support the change.
The internal presentation, dated July 29, says breakthrough cases are expected to increase as a proportion of total cases as the number of vaccinated people grows.
But it undercuts recent claims by public officials that as many as 99 percent of those who died with COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
According to data from COVID-NET that’s presented on one of the slides, 15 percent of the in-hospital deaths in May were among the fully vaccinated, a significant jump from 3.1 percent in April.
Additionally, 9 percent of COVID-19 patients in May were fully vaccinated, nearly double the number from a month prior.
COVID-NET conducts surveillance on laboratory-confirmed COVID-19-associated hospitalizations in nearly 100 counties in 14 states, constituting approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population.
COVID-NET’s public-facing platform does not show the percentage of hospitalizations broken down by unvaccinated/vaccinated. It does not show death statistics at all.
BYÂ ZACHARY STIEBER
