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(LifeSiteNews) – “Fully vaccinated” people accounted for the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden and the U.K. last month, government data has revealed, amid a rise in breakthrough cases and deaths in other Western countries.

The Public Health Agency of Sweden reported earlier this month that 70 percent of COVID-19 deaths between September 1-24 occurred in the “fully vaccinated,” according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Sweden recorded around 130 fatal COVID cases during that timeframe.

“It is still mainly about the elderly, but vaccine experts still see a tendency towards declining vaccine protection in Sweden,” Svenska Dagbladet said.

Possible reasons for the uptick in vaccinated deaths include “that it has now been quite a while since the oldest ones were vaccinated, that the vaccine coverage has increased, that the restrictions have been eased, and that the Delta strain has taken over,” microbiology researcher Farshid Jalalvand told the paper.

Sweden’s death numbers crashed after health officials scaled back restrictions at the beginning of June, however, with virtually no COVID fatalities reported in the Scandinavian country throughout July and August. Deaths began to climb again by mid-September, by which time nearly 75 percent of Swedes older than 16 were “fully vaccinated.”

Despite Sweden’s mass vaccination campaign, the recent surge in infections has led to the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Swedish senior care residents since February.

New testing protocol announced by Swedish authorities last week may make breakthrough cases less of a factor in future data reporting in any case. On Thursday, the Public Health Agency announced that “fully vaccinated” people with coronavirus symptoms will be exempt from testing requirements, days after the agency revealed the spike in post-vaccination COVID deaths.

UK: 70% of COVID deaths were ‘fully vaccinated’

Recent data published by British health authorities indicated a similar breakthrough surge in the U.K.

A report by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) published October 7 noted that most British COVID-19 deaths in September were among the “fully vaccinated,” as were most hospitalizations. The U.K. has a nearly identical vaccination rate to Sweden’s.

Between September 6 and October 3, 70 percent of deadly COVID cases occurred in the fully-jabbed, according to the UKHSA data, with 2,281 deaths in “fully vaccinated” people and just 611 in the unvaccinated within 28 days of a positive test. Partially vaccinated people accounted for 98 deaths.

The COVID-19 fatalities among “fully vaccinated” Brits represented a dramatic increase from August, The Exposé observed. Public Health England last month had reported 600 coronavirus deaths in the unvaccinated population between August 9 and September 5 and 1,659 in the doubly-vaccinated.

The latest UKSHA figures also showed that vaccinated patients dominated COVID-19 hospitalizations. 3,910 “fully vaccinated” people were admitted to the hospital for COVID between September 6 and October 3, compared with around 2,400 unvaccinated patients. The fully or partially vaccinated together accounted for roughly 64 percent of total COVID-related hospitalizations.

Britain’s rise in COVID-19 breakthrough deaths reflects trends in other highly-vaccinated countries, including the United States.

A September presentation from the Department of Defense found that about 60 percent of elderly Medicare patients hospitalized for COVID by August 7 were “fully vaccinated.” Vermont, America’s most vaccinated state, also reported last month that 76 percent of coronavirus deaths in the state in September were fully jabbed.

In Maryland, where more than 85 percent of adults have now had at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, around one-third of recent virus deaths involved “fully-vaccinated” people.

“In the last six-eight weeks, more than 40% of the people who died in Maryland were fully vaccinated,” former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, a senior adviser to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, said this week in an interview with Fox News. The Maryland Department of Health has reported that breakthrough deaths were closer to 30 percent of the total.

Other countries grappling with deadly COVID-19 breakthroughs include Australia, where public data released last week said that 36 of 49 elderly care residents who have died after contracting the virus during the Delta outbreak in New South Wales were double-jabbed.