COVID vaccines linked to substantial reduction in hospitalisations
Wellington Faculty of Health – Te Wāhanga Tātai Hauora Associate Dean Research and Innovation Professor Colin Simpson has co-authored a study showing the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccines are linked to substantial reduction in hospitalisations.
Published in the Lancet this month, national and international media picked up the results released as a pre-print earlier this year.
Professor Simpson says this research provides encouraging early data on the impact of vaccination.
‘’Our findings show that vaccines are reducing Covid-19 related hospital admissions. We are beginning to move on from the clinical trials to look at data in real world settings. New Zealand scientists will continue to collaborate with colleagues across the world to support vital Covid-19 research.”
The study, led by Edinburgh University, showed the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines were shown to reduce the risk of hospitalisation from Covid-19 by up to 91 per cent and 88 per cent, respectively, by the fourth week after receiving the initial dose.
For those aged 80 years and over, the combined results for the vaccinations were linked to an 83 per cent reduction in hospitalisation risk in the fourth week.
The research was enabled by a network of ‘hibernated’ studies set up in 2012 that were ready to be activated when the next influenza pandemic took hold, pre-empted in part by the Swine Flu. This network was reported on in The Conversation in early 2019, before COVID hit: https://bit.ly/3aoHxIC
“Preparedness was crucial to ensuring the national data platforms and expert teams were in place to carry out these rapid ‘real-world’ data studies. These were unusual projects in that, once set-up and hibernated, they would only proceed in the event of a pandemic. Eight projects have since provided key scientific data to support the global effort against Covid-19.”
You can read the study’s abstract here: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00677-2