Image Credit : reuters.com
On Thursday, officials in Israel stated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly effective against the Delta variant of COVID 19. According to World Health Organization this Delta variant is gradually turning to be the dominant version of the coronavirus.
Pfizer’s medical director in Israel notified through local broadcaster Army Radio, “The data we have today, accumulating from research we are conducting at the lab and including data from these places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the Britain variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective around 90 per cent, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID 19,” as reported by TOI.
Sharon Alroy-Preis who is the head of public health at Israel’s Health Ministry stated that Israel is the one of the world’s most advanced vaccination campaign popularly based on Pfizer-BioNTech shot. She revealed that there is a lack of sufficient data to provide clear perception about the effectiveness of the vaccine against the Delta variant as yet. She further added that they are collecting data at the moment and are only examining the initial cases of the Delta variant to fetch more result soon.
On the other hand an analysis by Public Health England (PHE) established that both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccine yield around 90 per cent protection against hospitalization from the Delta variant. The Delta variant is also predominant and widespread at the place.
As far as the data are concerned, more than 9.3 million population of Israel has been given both the shots of Pfizer vaccine. As a result of this, the country have witnessed a sharp decline in its cases that encouraged the economic restrictions to be lifted.
However, in the passed few days the country experienced an increase in its COVID 19 confirmed cases. The Health authorities have requested the parents to vaccinate their 12-15 years children, who are eligible to get vaccinated in this month.
Alroy-Preis voiced that around 65 per cent of Israel population was protected from COVID 19 by vaccination or by recovering from the disease. However, the figure mentioned was yet far from giving ‘herd immunity’.