The COVID-19 Omicron variant, which has sparked global concern of being a potentially more contagious variant, has led to several European nations setting up restrictions overnight.
On Saturday, 27 November, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had said that Israel will, after government approval, ban the entry of all foreigners into the country for 14 days in response to the new COVID variant.
On Sunday, citing an official, news agency AFP reported that Israel has closed its border to all foreigners.
The variant has already been detected in Belgium, Botswana, Hong Kong, Britain, and Israel, sparking global concern.
The World Health Organization on 26 November, had named the B.1.1.529 strain of COVID-19 Omicron, after the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet.
Meanwhile, the United Nations' health body has warned that the variant has a large number of mutations.
Snapshot
Britain, Germany, and Italy detected cases on new COVID-19 Omicron variant on Saturday, 27 November.
Two Omicron cases were detected in Australia on Sunday.
WHO has asked countries in South-East Asia Region to be vigilant as cases surge globally.
Dutch health authorities say that the new 'Omicron' strain of COVID-19 was "probably" present among some of the 61 passengers who tested positive after arriving on two flights from South Africa.
Indian Council of Medical Research says that there is no need to panic and stressed on the need to ramp up vaccination immediately.
India recorded 8,774 new COVID infections and 621 deaths in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, active cases have declined to 1,05,691.
The protection provided by two doses of the Pfizer or AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines begins to wane within six months, new research suggests (Stock image)
In a reasonable “worst-case scenario”, protection could fall to below 50 per cent for the elderly and healthcare workers by winter, analysis from the Zoe COVID study found.
The Pfizer jab was 88 per cent effective at preventing Covid-19 infection a month after the second dose, but this fell to 74 per cent after five to six months - a drop of 14 percentage points in four months.
With the AstraZeneca vaccine, there was a protection against infection of 77 per cent one month after the second dose. This decreased to 67 per cent after four to five months, suggesting a fall of 10 percentage points over three months.
Pfizer’s mid-term efficacy trial observed an initial 96.2 per cent risk reduction in infection up to two months after the second dose. There was an 83.7 per cent reduction more than four months after the second dose, a 12.5 percentage point risk reduction.
The results of the study, which drew on more than 1.2 million test results and participants, will intensify calls for an Autumn booster vaccination campaign to help prevent a spike in cases and hospitalisations.
Other countries have already set out plans for booster campaigns. Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced that third inoculations will be available to most US adults from September.
Israel has already been administering booster shots for those aged over 50 following a surge in cases. Research conducted by the country’s health ministry also suggested the protection conferred by the Pfizer vaccine had begun to wane in the vulnerable population.
The vaccine rollout in the UK prioritised the elderly and vulnerable, beginning with care home residents and those aged over 80. As many will have received their jab over six months ago, the Zoe study suggests they are likely to be vulnerable to infection this Winter compared with those vaccinated more recently.
Real world analysis would be expected to show less protection than clinical trials, and the vaccines in the Zoe study were not trialled against the now dominant Delta variant of the virus.
Professor Tim Spector, lead scientist on the Zoe Covid Study app, said: “In my opinion, a reasonable worst-case scenario could see protection below 50% for the elderly and healthcare workers by winter.
“If high levels of infection in the UK, driven by loosened social restrictions and a highly transmissible variant, this scenario could mean increased hospitalisations and deaths.
“We urgently need to make plans for vaccine boosters, and based on vaccine resources, decide if a strategy to vaccinate children is sensible if our aim is to reduce deaths and hospital admissions. Waning protection is to be expected and is not a reason to not get vaccinated.
“Vaccines still provide high levels of protection for the majority of the population, especially against the Delta variant, so we still need as many people as possible to get fully vaccinated.”
Yesterday, the UK government signed a deal to get 35 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine for the second half of next year, in a clear indication that ministers are preparing for regular ongoing booster programmes. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is expected to rule soon on a booster plan for the UK.
The Zoe Covid Study launched an app feature on December 11, 2020 to enable logging of Covid-19 vaccines and monitor real-world side-effects and effectiveness in its cohort of over a million active users.
It used data from vaccines which were logged from December 8 last year to July 3, 2021 and from infections which occurred between May 26 this year when the Delta variant became dominant, and July 31.
The results of the study have been adjusted to give an average risk of infection reduction across the population.
The protection provided by Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine is dropping due to the Delta variant, BioNTech’s CEO told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Sunday, but most recipients are still protected against severe disease caused by the virus.
“The vaccine protection against the new variant is considerably lower,” BioNTech (ticker: BNTX) CEO Dr. Ugur Sahin told the Journal.
He said, however, that even though the protection against all symptomatic disease is dropping, protection against severe disease remains high, and most people may not yet need a third dose.
Sahin declined to take a position in the Journal interview on whether governments should authorize a booster dose of its vaccine. BioNTech’s partner Pfizer (PFE) has said it plans to ask the U.S. government to authorize a booster dose.
“This debate must proceed without us: We will only supply data and governments will need to tell us what they want,” Sahin told the Journal.
BioNTech shares were up 1.5% on Monday, and the stock is up 251% so far this year. Pfizer was up 0.3% and is up 13.6% this year. The S&P 500 was up 0.2%.
In recent weeks, as new cases of Covid-19 have climbed around the world, Pfizer has begun to push for authorization of a third dose of the vaccine. Health officials in Israel, meanwhile, have reported that the efficacy of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine at protecting against all symptomatic Covid-19 has dropped to 40.5% as Delta has become dominant in the country, though protection against hospitalization remains high, at 88%.
The World Health Organization’s director general, meanwhile, said last week that the world had squandered Covid-19 vaccines by failing to distribute them more equally around the world, and called the notion of administering booster shots a “moral outrage.”
“Some of the richest countries are now talking about third booster shots for their populations, while health-workers, older people, and other vulnerable groups in the rest of the world continue to go without,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom last Wednesday. “This is not just a moral outrage; it’s also epidemiologically and economically self-defeating. The longer this discrepancy persists, the longer the pandemic will drag on.”
In a note out Monday, Citi analyst Andrew Baum argued that Covid-19 vaccine booster shots will be authorized in Western markets for people aged 50 and older around the end of this year. “We have increased our concern that waning antibodies, especially in the elderly and immunosuppressed, creates public health risks that will likely necessitate at least one booster as well as continued episodic public health measures,” Baum wrote.
BioNTech’s Sahin has also warned that boosters could be necessary. He told Barron’s in April that patients may need to receive another dose of the vaccine six to nine months after their second dose, and then every 12 to 18 months after that. And at Barron’s Investing in Tech conference in June, Sahin said that antibody responses in people who had received the vaccine were stable for four or five months after the second dose, and at six months the antibody levels begin to drop. Redosing boosts those levels again.
“At the end of the day it’s also a decision of the governments when to introduce the booster shot for the population,” Sahin said in June.
In his comments to the Journal, BioNTech’s Sahin also said that he was staying out of the debate over whether countries should authorize booster doses.
“When the vaccine becomes available on the free market everyone will be able to make this decision for themselves,” he said.
(July 16): There is a substantial gap in the amount of antibodies that mRNA and inactivated vaccines can generate against the virus that causes Covid-19, according to a Hong Kong study, in the latest finding on what may have contributed to the varied outcomes following mass vaccination using different types of shots.
Bloomberg
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Bloomberg
July 16, 2021 13:16 pm +08
The research, published in The Lancet on Thursday, found that antibody levels among Hong Kong health workers who have been fully vaccinated with BioNTech SE's mRNA shot are about 10 times higher than those observed in the recipients of the inactivated vaccine from Sinovac Biotech Ltd.
While disease-fighting antibodies don’t account for the full picture when it comes to measuring the ability to generate immunity and the effectiveness of Covid vaccines, “the difference in concentrations of neutralizing antibodies identified in our study could translate into substantial differences in vaccine effectiveness,” the researchers said.
The finding adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting the superiority of mRNA vaccines in providing potent and comprehensive protection against Sars-CoV-2 and its variants, compared to vaccines developed by more traditional methods such as inactivated shots.
Countries from Israel to the US that have relied mostly on mRNA vaccines from Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech, as well as Moderna Inc, have seen a marked reduction in infections. Those using mostly inactivated shots from China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm haven’t experienced as much of a dent in case numbers, though the use of both kinds has significantly prevented more severe Covid and fatalities.
The lower effectiveness of inactivated vaccines has prompted countries from Thailand to the United Arab Emirates to offer already fully vaccinated people another booster shot as the more infectious delta variant fuels a resurgence in infections.
The Hong Kong study also suggested that future research could look into how booster shots can shore up antibody levels and protection among people vaccinated with inactivated shots.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines being deployed to fight the coronavirus pandemic are highly effectivein preventing hospitalizations among older adults, the group most at risk for severe disease and death, according to a federal study released Wednesday.
Linda Busby, 74, receives a COVID-19 vaccination card after getting a shot at a community health center April 7, 2021, in Clarksdale, Miss. (Rogelio V. Solis / The Associated Press)
While not surprising, the results are reassuring because they provide the first real-world evidence in the United States that both vaccines prevent severe COVID-19 illness, as they did in clinical trials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
In the study, fully vaccinated adults 65 and older were 94% less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people of the same age who were not vaccinated, according to the CDC. People who were partially vaccinated were 64% less likely to be hospitalized with the disease than the unvaccinated.
The risk for severe illness increases with age, and because older adults are at highest risk, the CDC prioritized them for vaccination. About 68% of adults 65 and older in the United States — more than 37 million people — have been fully inoculated, the data shows.
Early reports from Israel documented the real-world effectiveness of vaccination, including among older adults, but those reports looked only at those inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. In the CDC analysis, both Pfizer and Moderna were represented.
The analysis is one of many by the CDC and other groups to assess the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccines in real-life conditions. In the United Kingdom, another study released Wednesday found that a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine may reduce transmission of the coronavirus within households by almost 50%. Researchers from Public Health England said that protection was seen around two weeks after vaccination — regardless of a person’s age or contacts.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock called the findings “terrific news,” adding that the results further reinforced the need for people to get vaccinated to end the pandemic.
The Public Health England study found that those infected with the coronavirus three weeks after receiving one dose of vaccine were between 38 and 49% less likely to pass on the infection to close contacts, compared with those who were unvaccinated. The study was based on 57,000 people from 24,000 households who were considered contacts of a vaccinated person.
In the United States, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky welcomed that agency’s findings about protection for fully vaccinated older adults.
“The results are promising for our communities and hospitals,” Walensky said in a statement. “As our vaccination efforts continue to expand, COVID-19 patients will not overwhelm health care systems — leaving hospital staff, beds, and services available for people who need them for other medical conditions.”
Until now, there had not really been “system-level evidence for both mRNA vaccines at the community level,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, director of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Death rates for hospitalized older adults can be six to eight times that of people younger than 65, Marrazzo said in an email. Over half the individuals in the analysis were over 75.
The data gives clinicians even greater confidence in telling patients, “This vaccine will keep you out of the hospital if you get COVID — and that is not a place you want to be!” she said.
Carlos del Rio, a professor of medicine and global health at Emory University, said: “When you see that being fully vaccinated essentially eliminates the risk of being hospitalized with COVID even if you get infected, it makes me very happy.”
Unlike during the clinical trials, the CDC analysis of data took place as more-transmissible and potentially more-deadly variants of the virus were circulating, primarily B.1.1.7, which was first identified in the United Kingdom and is now the dominant strain in the United States.
The CDC study looked at hospitalizations among 417 participants during the first three months of this year at 24 hospitals in 14 states. Researchers compared prior COVID-19 vaccination in a group of 187 patients who tested positive for the coronavirus infection with a very similar control group of 230 patients who tested negative. To determine the real-world effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing hospitalization, they compared the odds of prior vaccination between these groups.
Among the 187 patients who tested positive, for example, only one person (less than 1%) had been fully vaccinated. But in the other group, 18 (8%) had been fully vaccinated. Even though the numbers are relatively small, the difference was still significant because it shows that patients with COVID-19 were significantly less likely to have completed full vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, the data shows.
As expected, the analysis confirmed that vaccination provided no protection to people who had received their first dose less than two weeks earlier. It takes two weeks for the body to form an immune response after vaccination.
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The Washington Post’s Jennifer Hassan in London contributed to this report.
image captionIsrael has the highest vaccination rate in the world
Israel has recorded no new daily Covid-19 deaths for the first time in 10 months, as the country pushes ahead with its speedy vaccination drive.
The country's coronavirus death toll remained unchanged at 6,346 on Thursday, health ministry data showed.
The last time Israel reported zero Covid-19 deaths was at the end of June last year, after lockdown measures curbed a first wave of infections.
Israel's outbreak has eased after hitting its peak in January this year.
The Israeli government started to relax lockdown restrictions a month later as vaccinations against Covid-19 were rolled out more widely.
Israel has the highest vaccination rate in the world. On Thursday, the country reached the milestone of five million Covid-19 vaccinations.
The health ministry said more than 53% of the country's population of about nine million people had received two doses of vaccine.
"This is a tremendous achievement for the health system and Israeli citizens. Together we are eradicating the coronavirus," Health Minister Yuli Edelstein tweeted on Friday.
Last week Eyal Leshem, a director at Israel's largest hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, said the country may be close to reaching "herd immunity".
Herd immunity happens when enough of a population has protection against an infection, thus stopping it from spreading.
World Health Organization (WHO) experts have estimated that at least 65%-70% of a population need vaccination coverage before herd immunity is reached.
Mr Leshem said herd immunity was the "only explanation" for Israel's continued fall in cases as more restrictions were lifted.
"There is a continuous decline despite returning to near normalcy," he said.
"This tells us that even if a person is infected, most people they meet walking around won't be infected by them."
Israel began its vaccination campaign last December and since then, it has been the leading nation globally for the number of doses per head of population.
The country has so far relied on only the two-shot vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. In February, Israel's health ministry said studies revealed the risk of illness from the virus had dropped 95.8% among people who have had both doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
The country is preparing to start vaccinating children aged 12-15 as soon as the US Food and Drugs Administration, a regulator, approves vaccine use for people in that age bracket.
