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Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine Effective for People With Chronic Illness, According to Study

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As someone who lives with vasculitis, I have been nervous about what complications I would get if I contract COVID-19, even once I am fully vaccinated. If you have had similar concerns, a recent study from Clalit Research Institute in Israel in collaboration with Harvard University may bring you a bit of relief.

The COVID-19 vaccines available right now don’t guarantee a person will never contract COVID-19, but it can minimize the symptoms a person experiences. For the Israel study, researchers took data from 1,503,216 vaccinated people to see the effectiveness of preventing COVID-19 symptoms after the first Pfizer vaccine, after the second Pfizer vaccine and seven days after the second Pfizer vaccine. The researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine in preventing illness in different categories like age and pre-existing conditions.

If you are wondering just how effective the Pfizer vaccine is for the chronic illness community if they contract COVID-19 after getting vaccinated, it depends on what condition or conditions you have. The study found that seven days after getting Pfizer’s second COVID-19 vaccine, the vaccine was 84 percent effective in preventing symptoms in immunosuppressed individuals, 80 percent effective in preventing symptoms in people with heart disease, 80 percent effective in preventing symptoms from people with chronic kidney disease and 86 percent effective in preventing symptoms from people with diabetes. The Pfizer vaccine was highly effective in preventing symptomatic illness in people who are considered to be overweight or obese, according to the BMI’s standards. The effectiveness of preventing severe illness from the vaccine was even higher.

One shortcoming of this study was the limited demographics it looked at. For this study, people were placed into three sectors: general Jewish, Arab or ultra-Orthodox Jewish. This does not take into the race of people who received the vaccine, and there is not a category for the over 30,000 Black African migrants, many of whom are undocumented, who live in this country.

Image via Getty Images/SeventyFour

Originally published: April 27, 2021
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