Waning of BNT162b2 Vaccine Protection against SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Qatar
By H. Chemaitelly, P. Tang, M. Hasan, S. AlMukdad, H. Yassine, F. Benslimane, H. A. Al Khatib, P. Coyle, H. Ayoub, Z. Al Kanaani and 14 more. medRxiv, 2021
783 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BACKGROUND: Waning of vaccine protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 disease is a concern. This study investigated persistence of BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine effectiveness against infection and disease in Qatar, where the Beta and Delta variants have dominated incidence and PCR testing is done at a mass scale. METHODS: A matched test-negative, case-control study design was used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection and against any severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 disease, between January 1, 2021 to August 15, 2021. RESULTS: Estimated BNT162b2 effectiveness against any infection, asymptomatic or symptomatic, was negligible for the first two weeks after the first dose, increased to 36.5% (95% CI: 33.1-39.8) in the third week after the first dose, and reached its peak at 72.1% (95% CI: 70.9-73.2) in the first five weeks after the second dose. Effectiveness declined gradually thereafter, with the decline accelerating [≥]15 weeks after the second dose, reaching diminished levels of protection by the 20th week. Effectiveness against symptomatic infection was higher than against asymptomatic infection, but still waned in the same fashion. Effectiveness against any severe, critical, or fatal disease increased rapidly to 67.7% (95% CI: 59.1-74.7) by the third week after the first dose, and reached 95.4% (95% CI: 93.4-96.9) in the first five weeks after the second dose, where it persisted at about this level for six months. CONCLUSIONS: BNT162b2-induced protection against infection appears to wane rapidly after its peak right after the second dose, but it persists at a robust level against hospitalization and death for at least six months following the second dose.
Subfields: Health, Infectious Diseases
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4db1e85e7c2b96aea39b1d5ee2f399ad3d281b05
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Infectious Diseases
Citations in the corpus
- Omicron extensively but incompletely escapes Pfizer BNT162b2 neutralization (2021, positive): “In addition, the timing of sample collection soon after vaccination (Supplementary Tables 2, 3) does not account for the waning of neutralization capacity 25,26 .”
- The Omicron variant is highly resistant against antibody-mediated neutralization: Implications for control of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, background): “These results suggest that two immunizations with BNT, which can provide more than 90% protection from severe disease upon infection with the Delta variant (Chemaitelly et al., 2021), might be markedly less effective against the Omicron variant.”