TEL AVIV – Israel’s latest data shows a 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 infections among 600,000 people who received two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, offering important new insights for other countries as they implement their own campaigns.
The vaccinated group was also 92% less likely to develop serious illnesses due to the illness, according to a study by Clalit, Israel’s largest health provider. Clalit compared 600,000 people who were vaccinated with a group of the same size that was not – in what was the largest vaccine study in the country to date.
Clalit said the study, which was conducted with a team from Harvard University, included 430,000 people between 16 and 59 years of age and 170,000 people aged 60 and over. It was the first of its kind to show such a high level of effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine for people aged 70 and over, due to the limited scope of clinical trials, according to the health provider.
The study was done so that each individual vaccinated was tested against an unvaccinated person who had a similar profile, including their level of risk of infection, level of risk of developing serious illnesses and general health.
“It is now unequivocal that the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine is incredibly effective in real life one week after the second dose, just as it was discovered in the clinical study,” said Ran Balicer, director of innovation at Clalit and one of the study’s authors, in a Hebrew statement published on Sunday with the study. The vaccine is even more effective two weeks after the second injection, he added.