Estimating real-world COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Israel

Aran, D.

The vaccination rollout of the COVID-19 in Israel has been highly successful compared to all other countries. By the end of January, a third of the population has already been administered at least one dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. Efforts to estimate the true real-world effectiveness of the vaccine have been hampered by disease dynamics and social-economic discrepancies. Here, using counts of positive and hospitalized cases of vaccinated individuals, we provide sensitive estimations of the vaccine effectiveness by correcting to daily case incidence. We find high effectiveness of 66-85% in reducing SARS-CoV-2 positive cases and over 90% in reducing severe hospitalizations. As more granular data will be available more it will be possible to extract more exact estimates; however, there is little doubt that the vaccine is highly effective in reducing cases, hospitalizations and deaths.