According to the Israeli study, Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine may be less effective against the South African variant.

The Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine may not offer as much protection against a variant first discovered in South Africa, according to a preliminary study in Israel. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, but suggests that the B.1.351 variant may interfere with the protection of the two doses of the vaccine, although it is not clear how much effectiveness it loses.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Tel Aviv and Clalit, Israel’s largest healthcare organization, compared nearly 400 people who tested positive for COVID at least two weeks after receiving one or two doses of Pfizer vaccine. 19. This compared it to the same number of people who contracted COVID-19 and were not vaccinated. Only about 1 percent of the people who participated in the study were infected with the South African variant. But the difference between being vaccinated and being vaccinated was strong. While only 0.7 per cent of those who were not vaccinated contracted the South African variant, the incidence was 5.4 per cent among those who were vaccinated.

The results suggest that the vaccine may be less effective when confronted with this variant of the virus. ‘We found an excessively higher percentage of the South African variant among people who were vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the group who were not vaccinated. This means that the South African variant can to some extent break through the protection of the vaccine, ‘said Adi Stern, University of Tel Aviv. However, the sample size was too small to find out how much less effective it is with the new variant.