We've been vaccinating people since December. There ought to be statistical evidence now of whether and how much vaccinated people still get sick from Covid and its variants. Why do we still hear that epidemiologists have no idea about this? For example, everyone being tested for covid or being admitted to the hospital for covid, should be asked if they've been vaccinated, when, and which vaccination. 70 million peop…
We do have real world results, and they’re mostly very good. For example, analysis of the real world effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel: > The latest analysis from the MoH proves that two weeks after the second vaccine dose protection is even stronger – vaccine effectiveness was at least 97% in preventing symptomatic disease, severe/critical disease and death. https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/pres…
This study, from Scotland, looks at risk of hospitalization after first dose of either Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine. The Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines look equally good. If anything, in the raw numbers AstraZeneca looks a little better that Pfizer, but the difference is well inside error bars.
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n523
> especially against the South African variant
There is this one study, a proper randomized controlled trial from South Africa with 2000 people. But it only studies the AstraZeneca vaccine. They only saw mild (15 vaccine recipients and 17 placebo recipients) or moderate (4 vaccine recipients and 6 placebo recipients) infections, so they can not say anything about severe disease, because no one got it.
And they only studied AstraZeneca. Unfortunately, this study has been giving AstraZeneca maybe an undeservedly bad reputation, as media goes around saying that AstraZeneca specifically is not effective against the B.1.351 variant, suggesting that other vaccines would be. But as far as I know, similar studies of other vaccines do not exist, so we just don't know yet if they would be, maybe, equally bad against the B.1.351 variant or not.