Researchers say further follow-up work is needed to understand the effect of a single picture to inform a second-dose delay policy.
A new study of health care workers in Israel has found that one picture of a two-dose vaccine made with Pfizer-BioNTech is 85 percent effective, raising the debate about the potential for doses to spread.
The medical journal Lancet on Thursday published the results of the study based on more than 9,000 health care workers from Sheba Medical Center, an Israeli research hospital, showing a fall with 85 percent of workers showing signs of COVID-19 after a period of 15 to 28 days after the first dose.
The overall reduction in infections, including experimentally confirmed asymptomatic cases, was 75 percent.
Disease reduction “supports the delay of the second dose in countries that are short of vaccines and scarce resources, so that single-dose population coverage is higher,” the report read.
However, he said a further review is needed to assess the long-term impact of a single plan to “inform a second-dose delay policy”.
Epidemiologist Sheba Gili Regev-Yochay warned that the group examined in the hospital were “mostly young and healthy”.
Unlike Pfizer-BioNTech’s own clinical trial, “we don’t have many (staff) here older than 65,” she told reporters. But she also noted that the Sheba study occurred at a time of an increase in COVID-19 infections in Israel, which flooded hospitals with new cases.
Pfizer declined to comment on the data, saying in a statement that it was conducting its own study of “the real-world effectiveness of the vaccine in several parts of the world, including Israel”.
Pfizer said it hopes to use Israeli data to look at the vaccine’s ability to protect against COVID-19 arising from emerging changes. Israel has become a real-world test lab since signing an agreement with Pfizer, promising to share a lot of medical data with the international drug giant in exchange for the continued flow of vaccines. aige.
The Israeli study comes a day after Canadian researchers suggested that the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech should be delayed with the high level of protection from the first picture to reduce the number of people receiving increase vaccination.
Their research showed a 92.6 percent efficacy after the first dose, based on a study of the documents the drug dealer submitted from the late-stage human trials to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December .
The results from Sheba Medical Center complement another Israeli laboratory study at Rambam Healthcare Campus where 91 percent of 1,800 health workers developed antibodies 21 days after receiving the first dose and before they got the second one.
The FDA said in December data from these tests showed that the vaccine began to provide some protection to recipients before they received a second look, but more data would be needed to assess the potential of a single-dose pill.
Pfizer has stated that other dosing methods of the vaccine have not yet been evaluated and the decision remained with health authorities.