Faculty of Biology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Maccabitech, Maccabi Healthcare Services, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.
Nat Med. 2021 Aug;27(8):1367-1369. doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01407-5. Epub 2021 Jun 10.
Mass vaccination has the potential to curb the current COVID-19 pandemic by protecting individuals who have been vaccinated against the disease and possibly lowering the likelihood of transmission to individuals who have not been vaccinated. The high effectiveness of the widely administered BNT162b vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech in preventing not only the disease but also infection with SARS-CoV-2 suggests a potential for a population-level effect, which is critical for disease eradication. However, this putative effect is difficult to observe, especially in light of highly fluctuating spatiotemporal epidemic dynamics. Here, by analyzing vaccination records and test results collected during the rapid vaccine rollout in a large population from 177 geographically defined communities, we find that the rates of vaccination in each community are associated with a substantial later decline in infections among a cohort of individuals aged under 16 years, who are unvaccinated. On average, for each 20 percentage points of individuals who are vaccinated in a given population, the positive test fraction for the unvaccinated population decreased approximately twofold. These results provide observational evidence that vaccination not only protects individuals who have been vaccinated but also provides cross-protection to unvaccinated individuals in the community.
大规模疫苗接种有可能通过保护已接种疫苗的个体来遏制当前的 COVID-19 大流行，并且可能降低未接种疫苗的个体传播的可能性。辉瑞-生物技术公司广泛使用的 BNT162b 疫苗在预防疾病以及感染 SARS-CoV-2 方面的高度有效性表明，其具有在人群层面发挥作用的潜力，这对于消灭疾病至关重要。然而，鉴于时空动态的高度波动，这种潜在的效果很难观察到。在这里，我们通过分析在 177 个地理定义的社区中，对大量人群进行快速疫苗接种过程中收集的疫苗接种记录和检测结果，发现每个社区的疫苗接种率与未接种疫苗的 16 岁以下人群的感染率显著下降相关。平均而言，在给定人群中，每有 20%的个体接种疫苗，未接种疫苗人群的阳性检测率就会降低约两倍。这些结果提供了观察性证据，表明疫苗接种不仅可以保护已接种疫苗的个体，还可以为社区中未接种疫苗的个体提供交叉保护。
