Higher adult vaccination rates against coronavirus are associated with lower rates of infection in unvaccinated people up to 16 years of age, according to a new Israeli scientific study.
The study shows that Covid-19 vaccines help protect minors and the unvaccinated in general. The researchers, led by Roy Kissoni of the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa and Tal Patalon of the Maccabitech Research and Innovation Center in Tel Aviv, analyzed data from the journal Nature Medicine and analyzed data from 177 geographical areas throughout Israel between December 2020 and March 2021, involving a total of 1.37 million people.
Vaccination with Pfizer / BioNTech had started in the country on December 19 and within nine weeks almost half of the population over the age of 16 had given the first dose. The study evaluated how the number of coronavirus test positives changed over time.
It was found that, on average, for every 20% increase in the number of vaccinated people aged 16 to 50 years, the number of positive tests in the unvaccinated population under 16 years of age in the same community was reduced by half. “Vaccination provides benefits not only to the person being vaccinated, but also to the people around them,” Dr. Kissoni told the New York Times.
“The findings show that vaccinated people not only do not get sick themselves, but also do not transmit the virus to others,” he added. Vaccinated people are significantly less likely to become infected with the coronavirus, and even if this is the case, they have a lower viral load, so they are less likely to spread the virus to others.
Thus, as the number of people vaccinated increases, the unvaccinated – minors as well as adults – are indirectly protected. The researchers noted, however, that their findings did not take into account the potential for increased natural immunity in the Israeli population following Covid-19 infection.
They concluded that, although the observed protection of the unvaccinated population from those vaccinated was encouraging, further studies were needed on the subject. However, other indications are gradually emerging in other parts of the world that unvaccinated children are indirectly benefiting from mass vaccination of adults, as the number of new cases in children is now showing a declining trend.
For example, scientists at the Brazilian Butantan Institute in Sao Paulo reported, according to Nature, that in the city of Serran, where 98% of adults were vaccinated with the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine by Sinovac, there was a drastic reduction in children's infectious infections.
In the United States, too, Covid-19 infections in people under the age of 18 fell by 84% between January and May this year, as more than half of the American adult population has received at least one dose of the vaccine.
“It simply came to our notice then. Vaccinated adults protect those who have not been vaccinated. “It really means herd immunity,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.
