The coronavirus remains, as does the great advantage of adapted vaccines. This was the result of an Israeli study in which the majority of people had already been vaccinated for the fifth time. This has reduced mortality from Covid-19 among seniors by 68 percent. The frequency of hospital admissions fell by 72 percent.
The study will be presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Copenhagen, and was published in full Thursday in the journal “Lancet Infectious Diseases” (DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(23) 00122- 6). The background, according to Ronen Arbel of the largest Israeli health insurance company “Clalit Health Services” (CHS) and his co-authors in the scientific journal: “From September 2022, a single booster immunization with a bivalent mRNA vaccine (Pfizer -BioNTech; Note) recommended for adults, most of whom were already fully vaccinated and at high risk for severe COVID-19.”
In Israel, the state’s early initiative for the Covid-19 vaccinations led to very high protection rates in international comparison. “When the bivalent variant of the mRNA vaccine was introduced in September 2022, the majority of the population had already received four vaccinations,” the Deutsches Ärzteblatt wrote about the current study on Friday. In the meantime, however, a certain vaccination fatigue has also arisen in Israel. Despite the free offer for the vaccinations, only 25 percent of CHS insured in the risk group over 65s would have been revaccinated.
High success rate of vaccination
Nevertheless, Arbel and his team analyzed the effects of the vaccine bivalent booster against the original SARS-CoV-2 variant (“wild-type”) and against the BA.4/5 omicron mutations in the first three months of using the the adapted vaccine. The scientists compared those 134,215 insured persons who had received a bivalent vaccine at an average age of 76.9 years (for 89 percent it was already the fifth vaccination; note), with 435,304 elderly people with an average age of 74.7 years who did not had received. vaccinated again. However, half of this group had already had three vaccinations and 40 percent had received four vaccinations. Nearly a third of all the people whose data were analyzed in the study had Covid-19 disease, which also leads to immunity.
Due to the mostly mild course of the infection due to the dominance of omicron variants, the number of cases was generally low. Nevertheless, high success rates were shown by repeat vaccination, even if it was often the fifth time. The results: 32 hospital admissions and 13 deaths were recorded in the group of people who had received a bivalent booster as a fifth suture. In the comparison group without these immunizations, there were 541 hospitalizations and 172 deaths.
This resulted in a 72 percent protection rate against hospitalization due to Covid-19. Mortality was slightly more than two-thirds lower in the revaccinated group. While efforts to achieve high protection rates against Covid-19 have recently been scaled back in many industrialized countries, the Israeli scientists wrote: “These results underline the importance of vaccination with the bivalent mRNA booster vaccine for populations at high risk of severe Covid-19 -vaccination. 19 disease progression.”
Source: Krone
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