Covid vaccines as effective with Delta variant as Alpha variant: Dutch health institute

The Covid-19 vaccines prevent hospitalization and ICU admission at the same rate regardless if the recipient is infected with the Delta variant of the coronavirus or the Alpha variant, the RIVM says on the basis of research using Dutch vaccination and hospital figures. The chance of being admitted to a hospital as a fully vaccinated person after infection is twenty times lower than for a non-vaccinated person. The chance of ending up in an intensive care unit is 33 times smaller when fully vaccinated.

On average, the Covid-19 vaccines given in the Netherlands prevent a person from requiring hospitalization 95 percent of the time, and 97 percent of the time against ICU admission, when someone was infected with the Delta variant, according to the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). In the Netherlands, most jabs were given using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The degree of protection after the Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines may deviate somewhat more from these percentages, because these vaccines were utilized less. Moreover, Moderna was used relatively more often with people who run a higher medical risk, which could increase the chance they require hospitalization after an infection.

People under the age of 70 who have been fully vaccinated with Pfizer are more than 98 percent protected against hospital and ICU admissions. This means that for this group the chance of being admitted is 50 times smaller than for unvaccinated people.

Additionally, the analysis did not show that the effectiveness of the vaccines decreased in the first months after vaccination, according to the RIVM. The institute does mention that in the first four months of the vaccination campaign only one million people were vaccinated. There are now over 10.1 million who are fully vaccinated. The effectiveness of the vaccines against hospital and ICU admissions is therefore monitored continuously.

Between April 4 and August 20 of this year, 15,222 people with coronavirus were hospitalized. About 88 percent of these people were unvaccinated, according to the RIVM, 7.4 percent were partially vaccinated, and 4.6 percent were fully vaccinated.