Clinical Conversations » Podcast Feed

Governments’ directives about how and when to vaccinate people who’ve recovered from Covid-19 vary widely. But, according to this episode’s guest, Dr. Ronen Arbel, they all say they don’t have enough evidence to set firm policy. So, Arbel and his colleagues set out to collect evidence from some 150,000 patients’ records in Israel who’d recovered from the earliest waves of the pandemic. About half the patients subsequently received at least one shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and all were followed over a period of some 9 months. Arbel’s group, using the patients’ health records, tracked how many became reinfected with Covid-19 — during that interval, the Delta variant was predominant. They found that reinfection was roughly fourfold higher among the unvaccinated; they also observed less benefit among patients aged 65 and older; in addition, the results from one or two shots were statistically the same. Listen in to what this means for practicing clinicians. [Running time: 15 minutes] New England Journal o