JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s largest healthcare provider on Sunday reported a 94% drop in symptomatic COVID-19 infections among 600,000 people who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine in the country’s largest study to date.
Health organization (HMO) Clalit, which includes more than half of all Israelis, said the same group is 92% less likely to develop serious illness from the virus.
The comparison was against a group of the same size, with matching medical history, who had not received the vaccine.
“It unequivocally demonstrates that Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is extremely effective in the real world one week after the second dose, just as it turned out in the clinical trial,” said Ran Balicer, Clalit’s chief innovation officer.
He added that the data shows that the Pfizer vaccine, which has been developed in collaboration with Germany’s BioNTech, is even more effective two weeks or more after the second injection.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who tabulated national data, said Sunday that for the first time a sharp drop in the number of hospitalizations and serious illnesses previously diagnosed in the first age group to be vaccinated – 60 years or older – was observed in those aged 55 and older.
Hospital admissions and serious illness continued to increase in younger groups who started vaccinations weeks later.
Israel is rapidly rolling out vaccines, and its database provides insight into vaccine effectiveness and at what point countries could achieve immunity to herds.
Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch and Maayan Lubell; Editing by David Goodman