Vaccine efficacy

The effectiveness of medications, such as vaccines, may actually differ from that seen in clinical trials.

This may be due to the fact that sometimes pharmacological interventions are performed in well-controlled conditions within clinical trials but do not respond to real conditions of daily clinical practice. For this reason, studies of the effectiveness of vaccines in the context of daily clinical practice are extremely important.

A US study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows the high efficacy of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in real life in people over 50 years of age.

Professors of the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Gikas Majorkinis and Thanos Dimopoulos (Rector of EKPA) summarize the main findings of the study.

After analyzing data from approximately 100,000 hospital admissions between January 1 and June 22, 2021, researchers found that, in real life, the effectiveness of vaccines in protecting from hospital admissions, emergency visits or intensive care units is close to 90%.

An interesting fact that this study showed is that the adequacy of the immune response increases significantly after the 13th day after the first dose and is maximized around 50 days after the first dose, and it seems to remain stable for at least 3 months after the first dose.