Last week Public Health England (PHE) published its latest vaccine surveillance report. It estimates that 13,000 deaths have been prevented in people aged 60 or over in England and that 39,100 hospital admissions in people aged 65 or over have been avoided. At the same time, two doses of either the Pfizer or Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine provide between 85% and 90% protection from symptomatic disease. And the vaccine seems to reduce both infection in those who have received it, and is estimated to reduce transmission to others by a third to half. Add to this the fact that 60.6 million people have had one dose of the vaccine and 22.2 million have been fully vaccinated. There is debate about how effective the available vaccines are against the Indian variant, but early data from PHE does not suggests they are significantly hampered in their effectiveness against variants - yet. No vaccine is ever 100% perfect, but so far the available vaccines have done some heavy lifting for us so we risk forgetting that they are not a magic bullet.
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