The UK believes that vaccines are 80% effective in preventing hospitalizations for people over 80

LONDON (Reuters) – Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are more than 80% effective in preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations in people over 80 after a dose of either vaccine, Public Health England (PHE) said Monday. Friday, citing a previous study.

PHE said the real-world study also found that protection against symptomatic COVID in people over 70 ranged between 57-61% for a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and between 60-73% for Oxford-AstraZeneca four weeks after the first injection.

“These results may also help to explain why the number of COVID admissions to intensive care units among people over 80 in the UK has dropped to unique numbers in the past few weeks,” said British Health Minister Matt Hancock in Collective interview. “This is very encouraging.”

Britain has already administered the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to more than 20 million people, or just over 30% of the population, with priority for the elderly.

PHE submitted its analysis for peer review after providing initial findings on the impact of implementation in the real world a week ago. A separate study with healthcare professionals showed that a dose of a vaccine can reduce the number of people who contract asymptomatic COVID-19 by 70%.

The health authority said the evidence suggests that the Pfizer vaccine causes an 83% reduction in deaths from COVID-19 among those over 80. There was no equivalent data for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which started to be administered later.

SAVING LIVES

PHE’s immunization chief, Mary Ramsay, said that while more work needs to be done to understand the impact of vaccines on reducing coronavirus transmission, the effect of the launch was already apparent.

“This adds to the evidence that vaccines are working to reduce infections and save lives,” she said.

Another PHE official said that more work is needed to establish 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 the lack of clinical trial data for their decision not to implement it in older cohorts.

Asked whether the data justified Britain’s approach, England’s deputy chief physician, Jonathan Van Tam, said it was “not immunologically plausible” for the vaccine to work in younger people rather than older people.

“We think it would almost certainly work,” he said. “PHE data clearly justified this approach today.”