Study: Covid variant may ‘break through’ vaccine

JERUSALEM: The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can “break through” Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid19 vaccine to some extent, a realworld data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed.

The study, released yesterday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for Covid19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease. It matched age, gender and more.

The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1% of all the Covid19 cases studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israeli healthcare provider, Clalit.

But among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the variant’s prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated — 5.4% versus 0.7%.

This suggests the vaccine is less effective against the South African variant, compared with the original coronavirus and a variant first identified in Britain that has come to comprise nearly all Covid19 cases in Israel, the researchers said.

They cautioned, though, that the study only had a small sample size of people infected with the South African variant. — Reuters