On Monday, Public Health England (PHE) said that one shot of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines is over 80% effective at preventing hospitalizations from Covid-19 in people who are over the age of 80.
The analysis out of the United Kingdom states, “In the over 80s, data suggest that a single dose of either vaccine is more than 80% effective at preventing hospitalisation, around 3 to 4 weeks after the jab. There is also evidence for the Pfizer vaccine, which suggests it leads to an 83% reduction in deaths from COVID-19.”
According to Reuters, Britain has given the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to more than 20 million people, which is over 30% of the entire population. Elderly citizens are reportedly being prioritized over others.
The data also shows that “symptomatic infections” in people over the age of 70 went down after 3 weeks had passed since people received one dose of both vaccines.
At a news conference, British health minister Matt Hancock said, “These results may also help to explain why the number of COVID admissions to intensive care units among people over 80 in the UK have dropped to single figures in the last couple of weeks…This is seriously encouraging.”
PHE sent the analysis in for peer-review after they distributed their preliminary discoveries a week ago.
PHE Head of Immunization, Dr. Mary Ramsay, said, “This adds to growing evidence showing that the vaccines are working to reduce infections and save lives. While there remains much more data to follow, this is encouraging and we are increasingly confident that vaccines are making a real difference. It is important to remember that protection is not complete and we don’t yet know how much these vaccines will reduce the risk of you passing COVID-19 onto others. Even if you have been vaccinated, it is it is really important that you continue to act like you have the virus, practise good hand hygiene and stay at home.”
For people ages 70 and older, the PHE study showed that “protection against symptomatic COVID, 4 weeks after the first dose, ranged between 57 and 61% for one dose of Pfizer and between 60 and 73% for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.”
Reuters reports that a different study of healthcare workers shows that one shot of a vaccine “can reduce by 70% the number of people catching asymptomatic COVID-19.”
The information comes as some countries take note of how Britain decided to roll out vaccinations differently than other nations. Britain reportedly used the AstraZeneca vaccine on older populations while other European countries have said there is not enough data in order to do so, according to Reuters.
According to the BBC, England’s deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, said the data gave some insight into how the vaccine rollout “is going to hopefully take us into a very different world in the next few months”.
Van-Tam also said it was “absolutely critical” that second doses “are still part of the course of immunisation against Covid-19 and no less important”.
Van-Tam added there was a “significant likelihood” that a second dose of a vaccine would “mature your immune response, possibly make it broader and almost certainly make it longer than it would otherwise be in relation to a first dose only.”