Pfizer vaccine proves 94% effective in study

WASHINGTON: The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine proved 94% effective in a huge real world study published on Wednesday that involved 1.2 million people in Israel, confirming the power of mass immunisation campaigns to end the coronavirus pandemic.

The Israeli study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also demonstrated there is likely a strong protective benefit against infection, a crucial element in breaking onward transmission.

“This is the first peer-reviewed large scale evidence for the effectiveness of a vaccine in real world conditions,” Ben Reis, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and one of the paper’s authors, told AFP.

It involved almost 600,000 people who received the shots and an equal number who hadn’t but were closely matched to their vaccinated counterparts by age, sex, geographic, medical and other characteristics.

The efficacy against symptomatic Covid-19 was 94% seven or more days after the second dose - very close to the 95% achieved during Phase 3 clinical trials.

More than 217 million vaccine doses have been administered globally, according to an AFP tally on Wednesday, though the vast majority have been given in high-income countries.

Hopes are high that the inoculations will allow the world to finally emerge from a pandemic that has killed more than 2.4 million, infected 112 million.

But health experts have warned that unless the whole world has access to vaccines, the pandemic will not end.