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* Health minister hails "seriously encouraging" data
* Data vindicates roll-out in elderly, health official says
(Adds more background, deputy chief medical officer)
By Alistair Smout
LONDON, March 1 (Reuters) - The Pfizer and
AstraZeneca vaccines are more than 80% effective at
preventing hospitalisations from COVID-19 in those over 80
after one dose of either shot, Public Health England (PHE) said
on Monday, citing a pre-print study.
PHE said the real world study also found that protection
against symptomatic COVID in those over 70 ranged between 57-61%
for one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine and between 60-73% for
the Oxford-AstraZeneca one four weeks after the first shot.
"These results may also help to explain why the number of
COVID admissions to intensive care units among people over 80 in
the UK have dropped to single figures in the last couple of
weeks," British health minister Matt Hancock told a news
conference. "This is seriously encouraging."
Britain has now administered a first dose of COVID-19
vaccine to more than 20 million people, or just over 30% of the
population, with the elderly getting priority.
PHE submitted its analysis for peer-review after providing
initial findings of the real-world impact of the rollout a week
ago. A separate study in healthcare workers has shown one dose
of a vaccine can reduce by 70% the number of people catching
asymptomatic COVID-19.
The health authority said evidence suggested that the Pfizer
vaccine causes an 83% reduction in COVID-19 deaths among the
over-80s. There was no equivalent data for the AstraZeneca
vaccine, which began to be administered at a later date.
SAVING LIVES
PHE Head of Immunisations Mary Ramsay said that while more
work needed to be done to understand the impact of vaccines in
reducing transmission of the coronavirus, the effect of the
rollout was already apparent.
"This adds to growing evidence showing that the vaccines are
working to reduce infections and save lives," she said.
Another PHE official said more work was needed to establish
the efficacy of vaccines against the so-called Brazilian variant
of the coronavirus.
Britain's use of the AstraZeneca vaccine on elderly people
contrasts with many European countries, which have cited a lack
of clinical trial data for their decision not to roll it out to
older cohorts.
Asked whether the data justified Britain's approach,
England's deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam said it
was "not immunologically plausible" that the vaccine would work
in younger people and not older people.
"We took the view that it almost certainly would work," he
said. "The PHE data have clearly vindicated that approach
today."
(Reporting by Alistair Smout, additional reporting by James
Davey and Michael Holden
Editing by Gareth Jones)
