Three Hawaii residents who were fully vaccinated against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to the Hawaii Department of Health (DOH).
All three patients had received both doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, reported KITV4. They all experienced mild symptoms and did not appear to spread the disease to others, the DOH told the news station.
COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent infection, however they mitigate severe symptoms and lower the risk of hospitalization, health experts say.
One of the patients, an Oahu-based health care worker, received the second and final dose of the vaccine in January. The worker traveled to several U.S. cities about a month later, and tested positive following routine testing upon returning to Hawaii as per travel protocol.
Contact tracing hasn’t identified any additional infections among close contacts of the health care worker.
It isn’t clear which vaccines each of the three patients received.
Lt. Gov. of Hawaii, Josh Green, urged people not to be discouraged by the news, as the vaccines work “in a huge percentage of people.”
“Remember, 95 percent of people get immunity from the vaccines and five percent don’t from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine,” Green told news station KHON2.
“Some people are going to dive on to this and say, oh, then the vaccine doesn’t work. No, it does work. It works in a huge percentage of people, but not everyone and that’s an important message,” he added.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people who have previously been infected with COVID-19 should still get a vaccine.
“You should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19. Even if you have already recovered from COVID-19, it is possible—although rare—that you could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 again,” the CDC says on its website.
People who received monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma should wait 90 days before getting a vaccine, the agency added.
