Breakthrough Infections in BNT162b2-Vaccinated Health Care Workers

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Abstract
Hacisuleyman et al.1 described a cohort of 417 health care workers who had received the BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech) or mRNA-1273 (Moderna) mRNA vaccine. Two women in that cohort (0.48%) had breakthrough infections with SARS-CoV-2 variants. At our institution, 1137 health care workers were fully vaccinated with BNT162b2. Of these, 4 immunocompetent women (0.35%) had breakthrough infections; these infections occurred later than those in the study by Hacisuleyman et al. (at a median of 62 days after the second vaccine dose, as compared with 25 days) ( Table 1 ).1,2 This failure rate is higher than that in the initial phase 3 trial, in which 0.05% of vaccinated participants (8 of 17,411) had a breakthrough infection 7 or more days after the second BNT162b2 vaccine dose,3 but is lower than in other recent studies involving health care workers.2,4,5