Fifth Corona vaccination also shows high effectiveness

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The coronavirus remains the high benefit of adapted vaccines as well. This resulted from an Israeli study in which many people had already been immunized for the fifth time. Among seniors, this reduced covid-19 mortality by 68 percent. The incidence of hospital admissions dropped by 72 percent.

The study will be presented this weekend at the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases annual meeting in Copenhagen, and its full contents were published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The background, according to Ronen Arbel of Israel’s largest health insurance company, Clalit Health Services (CHS), and his co-authors in the scientific journal: “Starting in September 2022, a single booster immunization with a bivalent mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech; note) was recommended for adults, most of whom had already been fully vaccinated and were at high risk for a severe covid 19 course.”

In Israel, the state’s early Covid 19 vaccination initiative has resulted in very high protection rates by international standards. “When the bivalent variant of the mRNA vaccine was introduced in September 2022, the majority of the population had already received four vaccinations,” the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt wrote about the recent study on Friday. However, it said there has since been some vaccination fatigue in Israel as well. Despite free offers for immunizations also in the risk group of the over-65-J?hrigen only 25 percent of those insured with CHS would have let themselves inoculate again.

Arbel and his team nevertheless analyzed the effects of the bivalent booster with the vaccine against the original SARS-CoV-2 variant (“wild type”) and against the omicron mutations BA.4/5 in the first three months of using the adapted vaccine. The researchers compared those 134,215 insured persons who had received a bivalent vaccine at an average age of 76.9 years (for 89 percent, it was already the fifth vaccination; note) with 435,304 elderly persons at an average age of 74.7 years who had not been vaccinated again. Even in this group, however, half had already received three vaccinations, and 40 percent had received four. Nearly one-third of all individuals whose data were analyzed in the study had experienced covid-19 disease, which also leads to immunity.

Because of the mostly milder course of infection due to the dominance of omicron variants, the overall number of cases was low. Nevertheless, high success rates were shown by repeated vaccination, even though it was often the fifth time. Findings: In the group of people who had received a bivalent booster as a fifth prick, 32 hospital admissions and 13 deaths were recorded. In the comparison group without these immunizations, there were 541 hospitalizations and 172 deaths.

This resulted in a protection rate from hospitalization required because of Covid-19 of 72 percent. Mortality was slightly more than two-thirds lower in the re-immunized group. While efforts to achieve high protection rates against covid-19 have recently been scaled back in many developed countries, the Israeli researchers wrote, “These results underscore the importance of vaccination with the bivalent mRNA booster vaccine for high-risk populations for severe covid-19 disease.”