Andrew Marr has urged people to “stay cautious” after he contracted coronavirus despite having been fully vaccinated.
The BBC journalist said he felt “seriously ill” after catching Covid-19 earlier this month.
The political interviewer announced on his Sunday programme, The Andrew Marr Show, that he had contracted the illness.
Writing on the BBC’s website on Monday, he warned those who have been given two jabs against complacency.
“I had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine long before,” he wrote.
“I wasn’t behaving recklessly – but I did feel pretty much invulnerable.
“I was wrong.”
Recent analysis by Public Health England suggests that Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective against needing hospital admission with the Delta variant of coronavirus after both doses, with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine 96 per cent effective and the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab 92 per cent effective.
Marr, 61, said he is “pretty clear” that he caught the Delta variant of the virus while covering the G7 summit in Cornwall.
He said he initially felt as though he had a bad cold.
“Candidly, had I not been working at Broadcasting House with younger colleagues who had not been vaccinated, I might well have continued and tried to host my next Sunday programme,” he said.
However, he instead went for a coronavirus test, which later came back positive.
He added: “Two days after my first symptoms, I began to feel seriously ill.
“I had a high temperature, muscle ache, the shakes, a bad headache and flu-like cold symptoms.
“I couldn’t smell anything – not aftershave, not coffee, nothing.
“I kept starting books and giving them up and creeping back to bed again for yet another sleep. I wasn’t even much interested in the news.
“One day I would feel better, and the next worse again.”
Marr urged those who test positive to self isolate, adding: “You may thing you have superpowers because you have been double vaccinated.
“And, yes, the vaccine seems does protect very well against admission to hospital – at no point did I have difficulty breathing.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t become infected.
“And it doesn’t mean the illness, hiding behind those bland words, ‘mild and moderate symptoms’, won’t be unpleasant.
“In short, stay cautious, stay safe.”
