LONDON (Reuters) – Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are more than 80% effective in preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations in people over 80 after a dose of either, Public Health England said Monday ( PHE) citing a preprinted study.
PHE said the real-world study also found that protection against symptomatic COVID in people over 70 ranged from 57-61% for a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to 60-73%. for the Oxford-AstraZeneca four weeks after the first shot.
“These results may also help explain why the number of COVID admissions to intensive care units for people over the age of 80 in the UK has been reduced to single figures in recent weeks,” the Minister of British health Matt Hancock at press conference. “This is seriously encouraging.”
Britain has now administered a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine to more than 20 million people, or just over 30% of the population, with priority for the elderly.
PHE submitted the analysis for peer review after providing the first conclusions of the real-world impact of the launch a week ago. A separate study in health workers has shown that a dose of vaccine can reduce the number of people catching asymptomatic COVID-19 by 70%.
The health authority said evidence suggests the Pfizer vaccine causes an 83% reduction in deaths from COVID-19 among those over 80 years of age. There were no equivalent data for the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was started to be administered later.
SAVE LIVES
PHE head of immunizations Mary Ramsay said that while more work was needed to understand the impact of vaccines on reducing coronavirus transmission, the effect of deployment was already evident.
“This adds to the growing evidence that vaccines are working to reduce infections and save lives,” he said.
Another PHE official said more work was needed to establish the effectiveness of vaccines against the so-called Brazilian variant of coronavirus.
The British use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the elderly contrasts with many European countries, which have cited a lack of clinical trial data for their decision not to deploy it to larger cohorts.
Asked whether the data justify Britain’s approach, England’s deputy director general Jonathan Van Tam said it was “not immunologically plausible” for the vaccine to work in younger people and not in older people.
“We felt it would almost certainly work,” he said. “PHE data have clearly vindicated this approach today.”
Reports by Alistair Smout, additional reports by James Davey and Michael Holden; Edited by Gareth Jones