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Pfizer have published a press release stating that real-world evidence confirms high effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr Peter English, Retired Consultant in Communicable Disease Control, Former Editor of Vaccines in Practice Magazine, Immediate past Chair of the BMA Public Health Medicine Committee, said:
“It is great to see yet more good news on Covid-19 vaccines from Israel – a country which has been very quick off the mark in vaccinating its population. This means that they had data available before other countries. They have done an excellent job on analysing the real-world effectiveness of the vaccine from these data. The data reported here were acquired at a time when the prevalent strain in the country was the more transmissible (and possibly more virulent) B.1.1.7 strain. The vaccine used was the Pfizer-BioNTech product.
“The press release reports that: “Vaccine effectiveness was at least 97% against symptomatic COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, severe and critical hospitalizations, and deaths. Furthermore, the analysis found a vaccine effectiveness of 94% against asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. For all outcomes, vaccine effectiveness was measured from two weeks after the second dose.”
“This is very good news indeed. The fact that the vaccine not only prevents disease, but also infections (and therefore, presumably, transmission) is particularly encouraging news. IF the vaccine can prevent transmission with over 90% efficacy, we are much likely to achieve vaccine-induced population immunity (herd immunity), and thus – eventually to drive the effective R number below one through vaccination alone, which will (in due course!) allow us to relax social distancing and other restrictions.
“Sadly, all we have seen so far is a press release; not yet a pre-print journal article, let alone a peer-reviewed publication. This makes it hard to evaluate the quality of the study, or to identify sources of bias or confounding that might to any extent undermine the results. We have, however, seen some very good scientific reports from Israel previously, and I look forward to seeing the details of the studies underlying this press release.”
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
Dr Peter English: “No conflicts of interest.”