The high degree of protection offered by a booster vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech against the omikron variant of the coronavirus decreases again after a few months. This is evident from a new study published in the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine on Monday.
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Door Belgian
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“Pfizer/Biontech’s booster vaccinations against COVID-19 significantly improve protection against omikron, but after three months, protection from hospital admissions appears to have diminished,” said US epidemiologist Sara Y. Tartof of the Kaiser Permanente Health Consortium, the lead author of the study. There will be an increased resistance to the virus, it is emphasized.
Omikron versus delta
The study analyzed 11,123 hospital admissions and emergency room visits that did not result in hospitalizations from December 2021 to February 2022. Both the delta and omikron variants of the virus were in circulation at the time.
The Pfizer-funded study shows that three doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccines reduce omikron hospitalizations by 85 percent during the first three months. After those three months, that percentage drops back to 55 percent.
There is a similar decrease in efficacy for the delta variant, although the efficacy against this variant is estimated to be increasingly higher.