Israel has so far vaccinated at least 25 percent of its population against the coronavirus, which is leading the world, making it ‘the country to look at herd effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, say expert in infectious diseases, David Fishman. Recently, it seems that the case in Israel has dropped sharply, and although there may be some reasons for this, it is possible that the vaccination attempt is starting to play a role.
The number of reproduction numbers of Israel has declined quite sharply over the past few days, with about 25% of the country being vaccinated, and an additional percentage have at least partial immunity through pre-infection. pic.twitter.com/sVyCYYd9dj
– David Fisman (@DFisman) 17 January 2021
One Clalit study published last week reports that 14 days after receiving the first Pfizer BioNTech shot, infection rates among 200,000 Israelis older than 60 fell by 33 percent among those vaccinated, compared to 200,000 from the same demographics that did not get a slap. .
At first glance Fishman write, it may seem disappointing as clinical trials indicate that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective. But he actually believe the figure of 33 per cent is ‘favorable’. Because vaccinated and non-vaccinated people mix, there can be a herd effect of vaccination. In other words, when vaccinated people deal with people who have not had their shot, the latter individual can still be protected because the other person is. On a larger scale, this would reduce the number of infections among non-vaccinated people, narrowing the gap between the infection rates of the two groups.
Estimated vaccination efficacy is a function of the relative risk of infection in the vaccinated … if there is indirect protection by herd effects, we expect the efficacy estimates to decrease as the risk among non-vaccinated decreases.
– David Fisman (@DFisman) 17 January 2021
More information should come in, and Fishman thinks ‘we will know more this week’, but he is cautiously optimistic about how it will go.
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