The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine proved 94 percent effective in a huge real world study published Wednesday that involved 1.2 million people in Israel, confirming the power of mass immunization campaigns to end the coronavirus pandemic.
A huge study in Israel found that the vaccine reduced symptomatic cases by 94 percent a week after the second dose, and reduced severe disease by 92 percent.
Identifying the source of SARS-CoV-2 is important for containing fresh outbreaks
By concluding that a virus leak from a laboratory in China’s Wuhan, where the SARS-CoV-2 virus first emerged, is “extremely unlikely” and did not require further study, a 17-member WHO team and its Chinese counterparts have put to rest conspiracy theories that emerged early during the pandemic. While many scientists had dismissed the lab-origin theory, in mid-February 2020, a group of 27 prominent scientists from outside China “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” in a letter published in
The Lancet. The group said scientists who had analysed virus genome sequence data shared by China and multiple countries could “overwhelmingly conclude” that SARS-CoV-2, like emerging pathogens, had originated in wildlife. Even a year since the letter and after nearly half-a-million genome submissions to a public database, scientists have not found any sign of direct human influence. The WHO team�