People who received Pfizer COVID-19 booster are 10 times less likely to get infected with the COVID-19 virus, and had 90% lower mortality, compared to those who were fully vaccinated but did not have a booster, new research shows.
Two massive new studies show that getting the Pfizer booster may be worth your time.
According to one study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on December 8th, 2021, getting the booster jab at least five months after the second vaccine dose led to significant protection from infection, ranging between 9-fold to 17.2-fold, compared to people with just two doses.
The study looked at 4,696,885 persons 16 years of age or older who had received two doses of the Pfizer jab in Israel, at least 5 months earlier. Researchers conducted a primary and a secondary analysis. In the primary analysis, researchers compared rates of severe illness and death between those who received the booster jab 12 days earlier, to participants who did not receive a booster. In the secondary analysis, researchers compared participants who received the booster a bit earlier, three to seven days earlier, compared to people not receiving the booster.
“The rate of confirmed infection was lower in the booster group than in the non-booster group by a factor of approximately 10 (range across five age groups, 9.0 to 17.2) and was lower in the booster group (primary analysis) than in the early post-booster group (secondary analysis) by a factor of 4.9 to 10.8,” the authors wrote in their report.
Also, compared to the people not receiving the booster, the author wrote: “Among those 60 years of age or older, mortality was lower by a factor of 14.7 (95% CI, 10.0 to 21.4) in the primary analysis and 4.9 (95% CI, 3.1 to 7.9) in the secondary analysis”.
In another study, also published in NEJM on the same day, researchers found that people who received a Pfizer booster at least 5 months after their second dose had 90% lower risk of mortality due to COVID-19, compared to people who did not receive a booster.
This study based their analysis on data from 843,208 participants, also from Israel, who were 50 years of age or older at the start of the study and had received the two doses of the Pfizer jab at least 5 months earlier.
Researchers found that among those who received a booster only 65 died (0.16 per 100,000 persons per day), compared to 137 deaths reported among the participants who did not receive the booster (2.98 per 100,000 persons per day).