South African variant of COVID-19 can ‘break through’ Pfizer vaccine, Israeli study says

The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can “break through” the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel has found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed.

The study, released on Saturday, 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.

The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1 per cent of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel’s largest…