LONDON (Reuters) – The Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are more than 80% effective in preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations in people over 80 after one dose of one of the two shots, Public Health England (PHE) said on Monday, citing a pre-print study.
According to PHE, the actual world study also found that protection against symptomatic COVID at age 70 varies between 57-61% for one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and between 60-73% for the Oxford-AstraZeneca one week after the first admission.
“These results may also help explain why the number of COVID admissions in intensive care units among people over the age of 80 in the UK has dropped to single figures in recent weeks,” British Health Minister Matt Hancock said in a statement. said a news conference. “It’s very encouraging.”
Britain has now administered a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine to more than 20 million people, or just over 30% of the population, with elderly people taking precedence.
PHE submitted its peer review analysis after giving initial findings a week ago on the actual impact of implementation. A separate study among health professionals has shown that one dose of a vaccine can reduce the number of people who get COVID-19 asymptomatically by 70%.
The health authority said evidence suggested the Pfizer vaccine caused an 83% reduction in COVID-19 deaths among those over 80. There were no equivalent data for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was administered later.
LIVING RED
PHE head of immunizations, Mary Ramsay, said that although more work needs to be done to understand the impact of vaccines in reducing coronavirus transmission, the effect of the deployment was already clear.
“This is contributing to increasing evidence that the vaccines work to reduce infections and save lives,” she said.
Another PHE official said more work was needed to determine the effectiveness of vaccines against the so-called Brazilian variant of the coronavirus.
Britain’s use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the elderly contrasts with many European countries, which cited a lack of clinical trial data for their decision not to apply it to older groups.
Asked whether the data justified Britain’s approach, Jonathan Van Tam, England’s deputy chief, said it was “not immunologically acceptable” that the vaccine would work in younger people and not in older people.
“We thought it would almost certainly work,” he said. “The PHE data clearly confirmed that approach today.”
Reporting by Alistair Smout, additional reporting by James Davey and Michael Holden; Edited by Gareth Jones