Former Minister Fernando Ruiz revealed the data on the effectiveness of vaccines against covid-19 in Colombia – Semana Magazine

The covid-19 vaccination campaign managed to ensure that seven out of ten Colombians obtained their complete scheme in just over a year and a half.

Well, on the morning of this March 8, The former Minister of Health, Fernando Ruiz, published a research paper in which the performance of the vaccines in national territory is analyzed. Ruiz was one of the key players during the pandemic, as he arrived at the Ministry of Health a few days before Colombia reported the arrival of covid-19 and he held office until August 7 of last year.

“Three years after the first case, the Ministry of Health team that faced the pandemic shares with Colombians the preprint of a study of the effectiveness of vaccines in people over 18 years of age, on the HOPE COHORT”, indicated the former head of the ministerial portfolio of health through his Twitter account. In addition, he warned that they analyzed the data of about 14 million Colombians.

And preprint it is a scientific article that is made available to the public before it is peer reviewed. This step is essential for any research to be published in a scientific journal, since these “peers” are independent experts who review the data, methodologies and analyzes carried out by the authors of a study and, if found correct, are in ability to approve.

Nevertheless, he preprint It continues to be a document that provides valuable information, even more so when it comes to public health data that was collected in the field and is of great national importance.

He preprint Published by former Minister Ruiz, it also bears the signature of several scientists and former directors of the previous administration of the Ministry of Health.

In total, they studied about 14.2 million people over 18 years of age in national territory, who were matched in a one-to-one ratio between vaccinated and unvaccinated. The people analyzed had received anticovid doses from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, Sinovac and Janssen, and the researchers followed their health status for more than a year: between February 2021 and June 2022.

This is how they found that for those of legal age, the general efficacy of anticovid vaccines to prevent hospitalization was 82.7% with the complete scheme. In addition, complete vaccination schemes managed to reduce the risk of death with an efficacy of 86%.

Among the findings, they found that the protection of the vaccines was lower in the population of older adults, something that confirms the need for booster doses to be applied.

They also found that although efficacy rates were high across schedules for all vaccine brands, Sinovac’s showed “significantly less” protection, but noted that its performance improved with booster doses.

“To control the pandemic, reduce the burden of disease, and protect national health systems, mass vaccination must remain a strategic priority, especially in low- and middle-income countries,” the researchers noted in the article’s conclusion.