Every person gets infected with the same amount of Delta strain irrespective of the vaccinations they have got, a large UK study showed. This brings light on the necessity of booster doses at a time when the Delta variant has taken the stride to become the dominant and most deadly form of coronavirus.
A number of studies had shown that the vaccines currently available do not provide enough protection against the Delta variant. Another proved that Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine’s efficiency declined much rapidly than AstraZeneca. It lost its efficacy within 90 days of administration with both doses while its competitor still retained its antibodies and offered protection.
In a recent assessment made by the Centers for Disease and Prevention, fully vaccinated people had the same virus load when they got infected with the Delta variant compared to those who weren’t vaccinated against covid-19.
Though it stresses the importance of booster doses, especially for the vulnerable category of people, several countries are reeling with insufficient vaccines to inoculate its population with even one dose.
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The United States is gearing up to begin its booster administrations as it announced on Wednesday that fully vaccinated citizens (those who got Pfizer or Moderna vaccine) will become eligible to receive the third shot after 8 months.
As for the other countries, Israel has already begun its Pfizer booster doses with 86 per cent efficiency seen in people aged 60 and above, while the UK is evaluating the categories who needs them the most.
The University of Oxford and the Office for National Statistics studied survey published its results on Thursday and assessed over 3 million PCR tests to ascertain facts.
An associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, Simon Clarke, said, “We’re seeing here the real-world data of how two vaccines are performing, rather than clinical trial data, and the data sets all show how the delta variant has blunted the effectiveness of both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs.”
Though Pfizer shows high initial efficiency, it will start dying down and reach AstraZeneca’s effectiveness within 4 and a half months after the second dose administration. This will bring it on par with AstraZeneca in handling diseases with high virus load, according to Koen Pouwels, an Oxford senior researcher, who headed the study.
With this, the possibility of achieving herd immunity is also in the dock. Sarah Walker, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford, said, “The hope was that unvaccinated people could be protected by vaccinating lots of people. The higher levels of virus that we’re seeing in these infections in vaccinated people are consistent with the fact that unvaccinated people are just going to be at higher risk, I’m afraid.”
