New Delhi: The US Health agency before deciding the need for booster shots, considered that the Effectiveness of the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine reducing after six months. Effectiveness of the Pfizer Inc-BioNTech SE vaccine in preventing infection by the coronavirus dropped to 47 percent from 88 percent six months after the second dose.
The data, which was published in the Lancet medical journal, had been previously released in August ahead of peer review.
According to the Analysis, the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing hospitalization and death remained high at 90Percent for at least six months even against the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus.
Researchers from Pfizer and Kaiser Permanente studied electronic health records of roughly 3.4 million people who were members of Kaiser Permanente Southern California between December 2020 when the vaccine first became available – and August of 2021.
Researchers further added that the data suggests that the drop is due to waning efficacy, rather than more contagious variants.
Luis Jodar, senior vice president and chief medical officer at Pfizer vaccines said that “Our variant-specific analysis clearly shows that the (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine is effective against all current variants of concern, including Delta,”
Vaccine effectiveness against the Delta variant was 93 Percent after the first month, declining to 53 Percent after four months. Against other coronavirus variants, efficacy declined to 67 Percent from 97 percent.
Study leader Sara Tart of Kaiser Permanente Southern California’s Department of Research & Evaluation cleared that “To us, that suggests Delta is not an escape variant that is completely evading vaccine protection. If it was, we would probably not have seen high protection after vaccination, because vaccination would not be working in that case. It would start low, and stay low.”
(_Vinayak Barot)