Vaccine gives hope in Israel
ISRAEL’S swift vaccination roll-out has made it the largest real-world study of Pfizer Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine. Results are trickling in, and they are promising.
More than half of eligible Israelis – about 3.5 million people – have now been fully or partially vaccinated. Older and at-risk groups, the first to be inoculated, are seeing a dramatic drop in illnesses. Among the first fully-vaccinated group there was a 53% reduction in new cases, a 39% decline in hospitalisations and a 31% drop in severe illnesses from mid-January until February 6, said Eran Segal, data scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
In the same period, among people under age 60 who became eligible for shots later, new cases dropped 20% but hospitalisations and severe illness rose 15% and 29%, respectively.
Reuters interviewed leading scientists in Israel and abroad, Israeli health officials, hospital heads and two of the country’s largest health-care providers about what new data shows from the world’s most efficient vaccine roll-out.
The vaccine drive has provided a database offering insights into how effective the vaccines are outside of controlled clinical trials, and at what point countries might attain sought-after but elusive herd immunity.
More will be known in two weeks, as teams analyse vaccine effectiveness in younger groups of Israelis, as well as targeted populations such as people with diabetes, cancer and pregnant women, among a patient base at least 10 times larger than in clinical studies.
Pfizer is monitoring the Israeli rollout on a weekly basis for insights that can be used around the world.
As a small country with universal healthcare, advanced data capabilities and the promise of a swift roll-out, Israel provided Pfizer with a unique opportunity to study the real-world impact of the vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech.
But the company said it remained “difficult to forecast the precise time when herd protection may start to manifest” because of many variables at play, including social distancing measures and the number of new infections generated by each case, known as the reproduction rate.
Even Israel, in the vanguard of the global vaccine drive, has lowered expectations of emerging quickly from the pandemic because of soaring cases.
A third national lockdown has struggled to contain transmission, attributed to the fast-spreading variant identified in the UK On a positive note, the Pfizer/BioNTech shot appears to be effective against it.
“We’ve so far identified the same 90% to 95% efficacy against the British strain,” said Hezi Levi, director-general of the Israeli Health Ministry.
“It is still early though, because we have only now finished the first week after the second dose,” he said, adding: It was too early to say anything about the variant first identified in South Africa
Israel began its vaccination programme on December 19 – the day after Hanukkah – after paying a premium for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
Four days later, the more contagious UK variant was detected in four people. While the vaccine is preventing illness in older people, the variant now makes up about 80% of new cases.
Finding themselves in a race between the vaccine and the new variant, Israel began giving shots to those over 60 and gradually opened the programme to the rest of the population.
Every detail was digitally tracked, down to in which arm the patient was jabbed and what vial it came from.
One week after receiving the second Pfizer dose – the point at which full protection is expected to kick in – 254 out of 416 900 people were infected, according to Maccabi, a leading Israeli health-care provider.
Comparing this against an unvaccinated group revealed a vaccine efficacy of 91%, Maccabi said.
By 22 days after full vaccination, no infections were recorded.
Israeli experts are confident the vaccines rather than lockdown measures brought the numbers down, based on studying different cities, age groups and pre-vaccine lockdowns.
The comparisons were “convincing in telling us this is the effect of the vaccination”.|