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- Israel will begin offering booster shots of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine this weekend.
- The vaccine’s protection against serious illness has declined over time from 97% to 81%, officials said.
- With the rise of the Delta variant, many countries are considering booster doses.
Israel to begin offering booster doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to its older citizens on Sunday, as health officials describe new data showing vaccine protection against serious illnesses declining over time .
An unknown key with the COVID-19 vaccine is the duration of protection. The emergence and spread of the Delta variant has intensified this uncertainty, with the variant showing the ability to partially evade vaccine protection.
In response to the latest data, Israel is offering a third dose of the vaccine to its citizens aged 60 and over and at least five months away from their second injection. Other countries are also considering whether and when to roll out booster injections. Israel had already started offering booster shots to some people with weakened immune systems, such as cancer patients.
There has been a trickle of studies in recent weeks suggesting that protection against Pfizer’s vaccine begins to wane after several months. Israel’s decision was prompted by signals of reduced efficiency, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Read more: Pfizer doubles record of COVID-19 vaccine booster injections
In particular, an Israeli scientist said the country had data showing that vaccine protection against serious illness among this age group over 60 increased from 97% in April to 81% in July. These results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal or posted on a preprint server.
Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said on twitter that if these results hold, they would be “the first sign of a significant decline in protection against hospitalizations and death for these vaccines”.
“I hope all data will be shared as soon as possible because the implications are significant,” he tweeted.
Israel’s results seem to contradict reports from the UK in June, with a large observational study finding that Pfizer’s vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization for the Delta variant by 96%. One difference between the two results is that Israel’s results are specific to an older population.
Pfizer presented more results on Wednesday supporting the company’s position that boosters would be needed six to 12 months after the initial vaccination. Pfizer’s lab tests have shown that neutralizing antibodies, a key part of the immune response, dramatically decreased eight months after the second dose of its vaccine in all age groups.
The New York-based drug giant also released detailed new results from its clinical trial that recruited more than 40,000 volunteers. Longer-term follow-up has shown that the vaccine’s ability to prevent symptomatic cases of COVID-19, regardless of their severity, dropped to 84% from four months after the second dose, from 96% effectiveness. during the first two months.
The overall vaccine efficacy against serious illness in this study was 97%, with 30 cases occurring in people who received placebo injections and one case in someone who received the vaccine.
Pfizer’s results have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, and the company said it will submit a request to U.S. regulators in August to begin offering booster shots.
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