Delta variant and vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisations
Delta variant and vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisations
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A preprint, an unpublished non-peer reviewed study, from Public Health England (PHE), looks at effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant.
A preprint, an unpublished non-peer reviewed study, from Public Health England (PHE), looks at effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant.
Publication
Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant
Not peer-reviewed
Peer-reviewed
What our experts say
Context and background
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Expert Comments:
Dr Peter English
This is more excellent news about the vaccines and their real-world effectiveness against the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
With over 14,000 symptomatic cases, 166 of whom were hospitalised, this provides good quality evidence of real-world effectiveness.
The effectiveness is not surprising – we know that vaccines are generally increasingly effective at preventing increasingly severe illness. Nevertheless, it is extremely reassuring to see that vaccines’ efficacy against hospitalisation with Delta variant disease is so close to their efficacy against the Alpha and original variants, and over 90% after two doses, for both vaccines.
This gives us more hope that the anticipated extension of the 21 June data for relaxing restrictions will not need to be delayed for too long, especially if further data (such as this recent paper1) show marked indirect protection.
- Milman O, Yelin I, Aharony N, Katz R, Herzel E, Ben-Tov A, et al. Community-level evidence for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine protection of unvaccinated individuals. Nature Medicine 2021. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01407-5).
