“Vaccinated people aged 50 and over are nine times less likely to be hospitalized or die from Covid-19 than non-vaccinated people,” summarize the authors of two reports published on Monday, October 11th by EPI-Phare, a scientific interest group under the dual supervision of the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM) and the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM).
Will confirming the magnitude of the vaccination’s effectiveness in France sway the last holdouts of the undecided?
“An unprecedented achievement,” these two analyses were conducted on a total of 22.6 million people. These are “the epidemiological studies analyzing the ‘real-world’ effectiveness of vaccines covering the largest number of people globally,” highlights Antoine Flahault, professor of epidemiology and director of the Institute of Global Health in Geneva. “The Israeli studies on the subject included nearly 6.5 million participants, the British studies 2.6 million, and the North American studies 3.4 million,” specifies the Swiss epidemiologist.
These two studies confirm the effectiveness of clinical trials already conducted with these three vaccines, under very controlled conditions, far from real-world settings. Most importantly, they confirm the previously published data on the impact of prevention campaigns conducted in Israel (The Lancet, May 5, 2021), North America, and the United Kingdom. In all cases, the effectiveness of the vaccines against severe forms and Covid-19 related deaths was between 90% and 97%.
