A recent study showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been less effective in South Africa at reducing hospitalization from Covid-19, since the emergence of the Omicron variant.
According to the study’s results, published on Tuesday, people who had been fully inoculated using Pfizer between November 15 and December 7 had a 70% chance of avoiding hospitalization, a decrease from 93% during the previous Delta-driven wave.
Protection against infection also dropped from 80% to 33%, according to the study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest private health insurance company.
Based on more than 211,000 Covid-19 test results, of which 78,000 were attributed to Omicron, the field study’s findings are some of the first about vaccine protection against Omicron outside of lab studies, which so far also showed a reduced ability to neutralize the virus.
South Africa had previously alerted the world to the new variant in November, warning of another surge in global infections and triggering an onslaught of travel curbs on the region.
The country’s daily infections have since risen to more than 20,000, with 35% of tests coming back positive as of Tuesday.
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