A new COVID vaccine efficacy study from Israel has concluded that Pfizer/BioNTech’s jab is up to 85% effective after the first dose.
The research, conducted by the Sheba Medical Centre, the country’s largest hospital, has been published in the Lancet medical journal.
The hospital assessed the effectiveness of the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine among 7,000 of its healthcare employees.
The workers each received their first dose in January and the research team observed an 85% reduction of clinical (symptomatic) COVID-19 between 15 and 28 days after the jab.
But critically, they also observed efficacy in asymptomatic patients.
The study found that all infections, including asymptomatic, were reduced by 75% after the first dose.
Professor Eyal Leshem, an infectious disease expert and director of Sheba’s Institute for Travel and Tropical Medicine, told Sky News: “This is first real-world evidence of effectiveness that shows up after the first dose of the vaccine.
“We had some hints from the clinical trials and some calculations that were made based on the clinical trial [but] this shows early effectiveness, even before the second dose was administered.”
