A real-world study from South Africa's largest health insurer shows that two doses of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine give strong protection against severe illness, but only if you get the omicron coronaviruses variant.
The omicron variant is more resistant to vaccines.
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The data from Discovery Health shows that the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine gives 70% protection against hospitalization and 33% protection against infections.
The protection against coronaviruses decreases after the second shot after 211,000 positive test results between November 15 and December 7.
The vaccine still offers good protection against hospitalization with omicron, despite being down from over 90 percent efficacy.
The data shows that this protection is maintained across all age groups and for people with conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, though there are slightly lower levels for the elderly.
Discovery cautions that the findings are preliminary, but that the data from the U.K. indicates that two Pfizer shots offer less than 40% protection against omicron.
There is little hard data on the new variant. This study analyzed an estimated 78,000 omicron cases in South Africa, where experts believe the new variant is replacing delta, though these have not been confirmed with genetic sequencing. The U.K., Norway and South Africa have all reported milder symptoms of Covid-19 than previous strains, but early evidence suggests previous infections may not offer much protection against the variant. Some experts and vaccine makers think that existing shots are still effective, while others think that booster shots should be sufficient.
The first person died in the U.K.
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