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Pfizer and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines highly effective against Delta variant: Study

15 June 2021 11:07 (UTC +04:00)

While the highly transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19 makes its way across the globe, at least two of the available vaccines show promise in tamping down its severity, APA reports citing New York Daily News.

Two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine proved 79% effective against the Delta COVID-19 coronavirus variant, while the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was 60% effective, The Lancet said in a study published Monday.

The Delta variant first emerged in India and has been classified as a “variant of interest” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), though the World Health Organization (WHO) has already termed it a variant of concern.

The fact that the Delta variant could become the dominant coronavirus strain in the U.S. by fall raises the prospect of new outbreaks later this year among unvaccinated people.

That variant, The Lancet study said, could double the hospitalization risk compared to the U.K. variant, which has been renamed Alpha. Delta originated in India.

The study was conducted on 5.4 million people in Scotland, where Delta is becoming prevalent. Early findings suggested that two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine do protect against the Delta variant but not as much as it protects against the Alpha variant.

The findings underscore the need to not only get vaccinated but to ensure one gets both doses, health officials said.