Researchers at the Argentine Ministry of Health have discovered that the COVID-19 vaccine effectively protects children and adolescents from death, regardless of the dominant variant of the virus. Research published BMJ.
Researchers evaluated the efficacy of two mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech) and an inactivated Sinopharm vaccine against COVID-19-related infections and death. Their findings are based on data from 844,460 children and adolescents (3 to 17 years old) from Argentina.
The results showed that the estimated efficacy of the vaccine against Covid-19 infection was 61 percent in children and 67 percent in adolescents during the delta period, and 16 percent and 26 percent, respectively, during the omicron period.
Although the effectiveness of preventing infection has decreased, vaccines still protect children from death due to coronavirus. Even in the omicron age, protection against death was 67% in children and 98% in adolescents.
mRNA and inactivated COVID-19 vaccines were already known to be effective in preventing severe coronavirus in children and adolescents, but qualitative data on protection against death were lacking.