Coronavirus in Scotland: First vaccine dose reduces hospital admission by up to 94 per cent, landmark study finds

A first dose of Covid-19 vaccine can reduce the risk of hospital admission by up to 94 per cent, a landmark study has found.

The research from several Scottish universities and Public Health Scotland is the first of its kind which measures vaccine effectiveness across an entire country, as previous results about efficacy have come from clinical trials.

By the fourth week after receiving the initial dose, the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines were shown to reduce the risk of hospitalisation from Covid-19 by up to 85 per cent and 94 per cent respectively.

Among those aged 80 years and over – one of the highest risk groups – vaccination was associated with an 81 per cent reduction in hospitalisation risk in the fourth week, when the results for both vaccines were combined.

Resident Annie Innes, 90, receiving the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Abercorn House Care Home in Hamilton.

Lead researcher Professor Aziz Sheikh said the results were "very, very" impressive and both vaccines were working "spectacularly".

"These results are very encouraging and have given us great reasons to be optimistic for the future."

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the results “exceptionally encouraging”.

"I hope it gives us all that little bit of optimism we need now for the future,” she told the coronavirus daily briefing on Monday.

The research, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, was carried out by teams from the universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Aberdeen, Glasgow and St Andrews, and Public Health Scotland (PHS).

They gathered data from December 8 – when the first doses were administered – to February 15. During this period, 1.14 million doses were administered in Scotland.

Researchers analysed data for every week during this period, including GP records on vaccination, hospital admissions, death registrations and laboratory test results, and compared the outcomes of those who had received their first jab with those who had not.

Professor Sheikh, director of Edinburgh University’s Usher Institute, said: "We now have national evidence – across an entire country – that vaccination provides protection against Covid-19 hospitalisations.”

Dr Jim McMenamin, national Covid-19 incident director at PHS, said: “These results are important as we move from expectation to firm evidence of benefit from vaccines. Across the Scottish population, the results shown a substantial effect on reducing the risk of admission to hospital from a single dose of vaccine."

He said the data was “encouraging” when looking at the effect of vaccination against the UK variant of coronavirus.

Dr McMenamin said that in Scotland, cases of the South Africa variant had “almost exclusively” been linked to travel, adding: “So it is unlikely that we’re able to see anything then about the effect of the vaccine for other variants, but certainly for the UK variant that we have seen across the time period of the study that we’re demonstrating for the whole programme a very encouraging vaccine effect.”

The work was funded by the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research and Health Data Research UK, and supported by the Scottish Government.

National Clinical Director Professor Jason Leitch called the results “very encouraging”, and lauded the “excellent reductions in hospitalisations”.