Israeli study finds South African COVID-19 mutant may beat the Pfizer vaccine

Finding from a yet to be peer-reviewed Israeli study, released on Saturday

In summary:
  • study compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease.
  • It matched age and gender, among other characteristics.
  • South African variant, B.1.351, made up about 1% of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied
  • among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the variant’s prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated: 5.4% versus 0.7%