Texas has seen nearly 9,000 COVID-19 deaths since February. All but 43 were unvaccinated people.
State health officials say at least 43 fully vaccinated people have died from COVID-19 in Texas since early February, which amounts to 0.5% of COVID-19 deaths during that period. Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune
Of the 8,787 people who have died in Texas due to COVID-19 since early February, at least 43 were fully vaccinated, the Texas Department of State Health Services said.
That means 99.5% of people who died due to COVID-19 in Texas from Feb. 8 to July 14 were unvaccinated, while 0.5% were the result of "breakthrough infections," which DSHS defines as a person who contracted the virus two weeks after being fully vaccinated.
The agency did not release details about the 43 deaths and noted that these are preliminary numbers, which could change because each case must be confirmed through public health investigations. Statewide, more than 50,000 people have died of COVID-19 since March 2020, but the rate of deaths has slowed dramatically since vaccines became widely available in April.
Dr. David Lakey, the chief medical officer of the University of Texas System, said people succumbing to the coronavirus despite being vaccinated was "not unexpected."
"No vaccine is 100%," said Lakey, who is also a member of the Texas Medical Association’s COVID-19 task force. "And we’ve known for a long while that the vaccines aren’t 100%, but they’re really really good at preventing severe disease and hospitalizations … There will always be some individuals that will succumb to the illness in the absence of full herd immunity."
He added that 0.5% is "a very low number of individuals in a state of 30 million … in the grand perspective of everything, that’s not a large number that would call into question at all the use of this vaccine."
COVID-19 cases have been surging in Texas and nationally — mostly among the unvaccinated — as the highly contagious delta variant has become dominant. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to Yale Medicine, is 88% effective against symptomatic cases of the delta variant, and 96% effective against hospitalizations. Researchers are still studying the efficacy of the Moderna vaccine against the delta variant, but believe it may work similarly to Pfizer.
DSHS doesn’t track the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations among vaccinated people statewide because hospitals are not required to report that information to the state. Travis County’s health authority, Dr. Desmar Walkes, told county commissioners and Austin City Council members in a Tuesday meeting that almost all new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the area have been among unvaccinated people.
"It’s not surprising that we have [increasing COVID-19] cases," Lakey said. "This delta variant spreads very rapidly among individuals, and there’s only some of these individuals who have been vaccinated, and a small number of those will have severe disease. But the vast majority of the people that have severe disease will be the unvaccinated individuals.
Disclosure: The Texas Medical Association and University of Texas System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article originally appeared in the Texas Tribune.
The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.