Health official confirms Covid-19 vaccines 98.4% effective

Medical Director of the Communicable Disease Center at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Dr. Muna Al Maslamani, has stated that nearly 98.4 percent of individuals who got their Covid-19 vaccination did not get coronavirus infection, since the start of the vaccination drive in Qatar until March 28.

She added that only 1.5 percent were contacted with the virus either after the first or second dose of vaccination.

Speaking to Qatar TV recently, Al Maslamani said that, “This came through our monitoring of more than 400,000 people who received the vaccine until March 28.”

She also mentioned that the vaccines such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are both effective vaccines against the new virus strains from the UK and South Africa according to these companies’ announcement, but people should not forget that these vaccines are not 100 percent effective and hence precautions must be put in place.

Dr. Al Maslamani said: “We still need more studies to see their effectiveness regarding the new strains.”

Both the UK and South Africa COVID-19 variants are still spreading throughout the region.

Over the past two weeks, Qatar has witnessed a rapid surge in the number of daily new COVID-19 cases and has been recording over 900 new cases per day during the past few days.

Dr. Muna Al Maslamani highlighted that, “In January this year, we monitored the number of cases admitted to the hospital in the acute cases unit which were about 7,796 cases, of whom only 57 cases had been vaccinated. The number of cases who entered the intensive care unit was 1,160, and only 7 of them were vaccinated.”

She also called out to all citizens and residents in the country to donate plasma as there are various infected cases and individuals who requires it because they are unable to intake other medicine due to different health problems and conditions.

“We suffer from a shortage of plasma and we call on those recovering from the coronavirus to donate plasma through the Communicable Disease Center at Hamad Medical Corporation,” she added.

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