The new COVID-19 vaccines provide a boost to protection against hospitalization, although that shielding wanes within months, according to unpublished data presented on Feb. 24.
A bivalent Pfizer or Moderna booster increased protection against hospitalization initially by 52 percent, but that protection dropped to 36 percent beyond 59 days, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers said.
The researchers separately looked at the protection of people who had received two or more monovalent doses, or doses of the original vaccines, and no bivalent booster. They found that people ages 18 to 64 had just 19 percent protection against COVID-19-associated hospitalization and that those 65 and older had just 28 percent protection.
That means the protection after two months was about 60 percent in total for the elderly and goes below 50 percent for all other adults.
The data came (read below) from the CDC’s VISION network.
Data from a different CDC-run net...