A large, real-world study involving half a million people revealed that the BioNTech-Pfizer coronavirus vaccine is 94% effective.
The paper is in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday and studied 1.2 million people during Israel’s mass vaccination campaign.
What did the study reveal?
The study showed that two shots of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine cut the symptomatic COVID-19 cases by 94% in all age groups, while a single shot was 57% effective in protecting against symptomatic infections after two weeks.
The study found that the vaccine was also 92% effective in preventing serious illnesses after two shots and 62% after one.
The results of the study were close to those in last year’s clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which found that two doses were 95% effective.
This has shown that there can be a strong protective benefit against infection, a factor that is considered crucial to break the transmission.
How was the study conducted?
The study was led by researchers from the Clalit Research Institute and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, in collaboration with Harvard University in the United States.
The research was done between 20 December 2020 and 1 February 2021, when the British variant of the coronavirus spread in Israel.
The study compared nearly 600,000 people aged 16 and older in Israel’s largest healthcare organization, who received Pfizer-BioNTech doses in December or January, with an equal number of people of the same age, gender and health who did not get the chance .
None of the participants had contracted the virus in the past.
Lead author Noam Barda, head of epidemiology and research at the Clalit Research Institute, told the AFP news agency that the matching process is very strong.
The outcomes were then recorded on days 14-20 after the first shot and day seven or later after the second shot.
Researchers are ‘surprised’ by the results
Senior author Ran Balicer said the results show that the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine is ‘extremely effective in the real world’ after the second dose.
“We were surprised because we expected that in the real world, where cold chain is not perfectly maintained and the population is older and sicker, you would not get as good results as in the controlled clinical trials,” Balicer said. Reuters news agency.
“We have shown that the vaccine is just as effective in many different subgroups, in the young and in the old in those who have no co-morbidity, and in those with few comorbidities,” he added.
dvv / rs (AFP, AP, Reuters)