reuters | The Pfizer-BioNTech >PFE.N< vaccine is highly effective against the Delta variant of COVID-19, a Pfizer official in Israel said on Thursday.
First identified in India, Delta is becoming the globally dominant variant of the coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.
"The data we have today, accumulating from research we are conducting at the lab and including data from those places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID-19," Alon Rappaport, Pfizer's medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio.
A study by researchers from the University of Texas together with Pfizer and BioNtech and published this month by Nature journal found that antibodies elicited by the vaccine were still able to neutralize all tested variants, including Delta, albeit at reduced strength.
"We continue to synthesize viruses in our labs and with collaborators as we see new variants emerge so we can conduct testing to obtain the most information we can about our vaccine’s impact on neutralisation of emerging strains," a Pfizer spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.
Other recent studies have also shown the vaccine is likely to provide high protection against the variant. read more
Israel has one of the world's most advanced vaccination campaigns largely based on the Pfizer-BioNTech shot. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health at Israel's Health Ministry, said that Israel still lacks enough data to provide insight into vaccine effectiveness against the Delta variant.
"We are collecting the data now. We are only now seeing the first cases of the Delta variant in Israel - about 200 of those - so we will know more soon," she told reporters on Wednesday.
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