Newly released data from Pfizer/BioNTech’s ongoing study of their COVID-19 vaccine suggests it is effective at preventing serious symptoms and death at least six months after vaccination.
The pharmaceutical company released the data Thursday morning. It looked at results of ongoing data collected from their more than 46,000 trial participants, showing the safety and efficacy held up over the last several months.
"The vaccine was 100% effective against severe disease as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and 95.3% effective against severe COVID-19 as defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)," Pfizer and BioNTech said in a joint statement.
The new data also suggests the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is effective against the South African variant of the coronavirus, which has been shown to be more contagious and slip by some parts of the body’s immune response.
When this vaccine was conducting vaccine trials last fall, the variant was not as prevalent in the testing sample and there had been questions about how effective the vaccine would be against it.
The data released Thursday says they had 800 volunteers in South Africa in the trial, and there were nine cases of COVID-19, all in the group that received the placebo. Of those positive cases, six of them were determined to be the B.1.351 variant, known as the South African variant.
Earlier this week, Pfizer/BioNTech had hopeful results from a vaccine trial in children between 12 and 15 years old.