The two vaccines approved and in use in Britain showed high efficacy rates in trials, but it takes time for data to creep through on efficacy in the real-world. We are, however, getting the first figures trickling through. This morning comes a paper evaluating the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines in preventing hospitalisation rates in the Scottish population, using a dataset that covers 5.4 million people, 99 per cent of the population.
The Eave II study, led by the University of Edinburgh, followed the 650,000 people who received the Pfizer vaccine between 8 December and 15 February and the 490,000 people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine between 4 January and 15 February. The Pfizer vaccine was estimated to have reduced hospitalisations by 85 per cent between days 28 and 34 after the first dose. The AstraZeneca vaccine was found to reduce them by 94 per cent.
The results are notable not only because they show that both vaccines are highly effective on a population-wide scale; they also suggest that the AstraZeneca vaccine is slightly better than the Pfizer vaccine at preventing hospitalisations.
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