The vaccination could become a race against time. After all, at any moment a corona mutant could emerge that outsmarts the vaccines. In Israel, it has already been established that the South African variant is better able to ‘break through the defense of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine’ than other forms of the virus.
One of the authors told AFP news agency on Sunday that their study showed that the South African variant is relatively successful in infecting vaccinated people. That does not say anything about whether you can still become seriously ill if you have been vaccinated.
Tel Aviv University researchers compared 400 unvaccinated and 400 partially or fully vaccinated people. According to the study, which was published as a draft on Saturday, the South African variant accounted for less than one percent of the infections in Israel. “But among the 150 people who were fully vaccinated and received Covid-19, the variant was eight times more common than in unvaccinated people,” the researchers said.
“This means that the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, although it has a very high effectiveness, may not offer the same protection against the South African variant (B.1.351),” it sounds.
“The South African variant is able to break through vaccine protection to some extent,” said Tel Aviv University professor Adi Stern. Stern emphasizes that it has not been investigated whether the infected people also became seriously ill, despite their vaccination. “Since the number of infected people is very small, it is statistically meaningless to say anything about it.”
