Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine booster shot cuts deaths in people aged 50 and over by 90% compared to those who did not receive a booster shot, an Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday showed.
Researchers for the Clalit Research Institute, Ben Gurion University and Sapir College obtained data for all members of Clalit Health Services who were 50 years of age or older at the start of the study and had received two vaccine doses at least 5 months earlier.
A total of 843,208 participants met the eligibility criteria, of whom 758,118 (90%) received the booster during the 54-day study period.
Death due to COVID-19 occurred in 65 participants in the booster group (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day) and in 137 participants in the non-boostered group (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day), constituting an average 90% drop in fatalities, with men seeing 88% fewer deaths and women 94% fewer deaths.
"The results of the study unequivocally show that the booster vaccine is significantly associated with a reduction in the risk of dying of coronavirus, including the Delta strain," says Dr. Doron Netzer, head of community medicine at Clalit.
“There are very few interventions in the medical world that can be attributed to a tenfold reduction in risk of mortality as we found for the booster vaccine. The findings provide important and research-based information for the population in Israel and other countries that are still undecided about administering a third vaccine dose, all the more so in light of the outbreak of the Omicron strain and the fear of another morbidity wave."
Clalit Research Institute, which has been at the forefront of research about the COVID-19 pandemic, said back in October that teens vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine are 90% more protected from infection than their unvaccinated counterparts and 93% less likely to develop symptomatic illness based on data from 94,354 Israeli teens aged 12–18 who were inoculated against the pathogen and data from the same number of unvaccinated teens.
A previous Clalit study about the booster shot showed that it reduces hospitalizations by 93%, serious illness by 92% and mortality by 81%.