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| A paramedic with Israel's Magen David Adom medical services administers the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a Palestinian man at the Shuafat refugee camp checkpoint in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on March 17. (Photo by=AFP-JIJI) |
[Asia News Communication = Reporter Reakkana] A real-world data study in Israel found that the coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can “breakthrough” Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research hasn’t been peer-reviewed.
Reuters said that the study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 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 and gender, among other characteristics. The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1% of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel’s largest 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 COVID-19 cases in Israel, the researchers said. The researchers cautioned, though, that the study only had a small sample size of people infected with the South African variant because of its rarity in Israel.
