Israeli study: 75% protection with a single dose of Pfizer/BNT vaccine

Israeli researchers released a new study on the Wuhan pneumonia (novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19) vaccine on the 18th, which showed that a single dose of the Pfizer/BNT vaccine provided 75% protection. The study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, is expected to help governments further improve the vaccination process.

The Times of Israel reports that the study was conducted at Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital, where 7,214 health care workers received their first dose of the vaccine. Follow-up (between the second and fourth weeks after vaccination) showed that just one dose of the vaccine had an 85 percent chance of reducing symptoms of wulong and a 75 percent chance of protection against wulong.

Arnon Afek, director general of Sheba Medical Center, noted that the results of this groundbreaking study can be endorsed by the UK government. The UK is currently using 2 vaccines, Oxford/AZ and Pfizer/BNT, on a large scale for national vaccination.

The UK government has advocated that the number of people vaccinated should be as large as possible given the limited availability of the vaccine, especially in high-risk groups, so that people who have received their first dose should not be revaccinated until approximately 12 weeks later, and this approach to vaccination, which differs from that of other countries, has previously been questioned by some experts.

Gili Regev-Yochay, director of epidemiology at Sheba Medical Center, said the study’s credibility is extremely high because the hospital’s health care workers have strictly followed the relevant norms, unlike the general public, which is more difficult to control and predict.

But she also said the study has its “unilateralities,” such as the fact that the health care workers tested were not only younger but also fitter than the general population, and that another problem is that the study was stopped only after the fourth week of vaccination, so it is impossible to determine how long the protection of the first dose of vaccine lasts.