Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty two since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic.
Speaker 1: Today's main story Israel has been a model for how
Speaker 1: to quickly vaccinate millions of people. Now the country has
Speaker 1: come out with one of the best studies yet on
Speaker 1: the effectiveness of the vaccine, and the news is very good.
Speaker 1: But first, here's what happened in virus news today. The
Speaker 1: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is finally letting
Speaker 1: people know what they can and can't do after they've
Speaker 1: been vaccinated. According to new CDC guidelines, innoculated people can
Speaker 1: visit indoors without masks, but must still wear them in
Speaker 1: public and avoid large gatherings around unvaccinated or vulnerable people.
Speaker 1: Germany will drastically speed up its vaccination campaign to as
Speaker 1: many as ten million weekly inoculations by late March. The
Speaker 1: country's finance ministers set on German television that in April,
Speaker 1: May and June, vaccination centers and doctors will have to
Speaker 1: handle millions of doses every week. Germany has administered a
Speaker 1: total of seven point three three million doses since inoculation
Speaker 1: started ten weeks ago, according to Bloomberg's Vaccine Tracker. Finally,
Speaker 1: India's COVID nineteen vaccination drive has jumped nearly fourfold. After
Speaker 1: a sluggish start, The country's program, one of the world's biggest,
Speaker 1: sped up after it expanded eligibility and got a crucial
Speaker 1: public endorsed it from the inoculation of Prime Minister Norrendra Moody.
Speaker 1: Almost twenty one million shots have been administered in India
Speaker 1: so far, up from five point eight million a month ago,
Speaker 1: according to data compiled as of Monday by Bloomberg and
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins University and Now for today's main story. Israel
Speaker 1: has had one of the world's most successful vaccination efforts
Speaker 1: yet now a new study from the country shows the
Speaker 1: Fiser vaccine was overwhelmingly effective against the virus. Public health
Speaker 1: experts say the Israeli studies shows that immunizations could end
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Naomi Krasy reports on what makes the Israeli
Speaker 1: study so significant and why at might point to an
Speaker 1: eventual way out of the pandemic. Art These are the
Speaker 1: sounds of a busy vaccination center in Israel. Early this month,
Speaker 1: the country's inoculation campaign started on December. By now more
Speaker 1: than half its nine million residents have had at least
Speaker 1: a first dose, largely of the Messenger RNA vaccine developed
Speaker 1: by Fiser and its German partner by On Tech. That's
Speaker 1: the highest COVID vaccination rate in the world. And as
Speaker 1: part of a deal for quick vaccine shipments that Israeli
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who made with Fiser, he agreed
Speaker 1: to share the data on the real world results. Netanyah
Speaker 1: who explained the project at a World Economic Forum meeting
Speaker 1: in January, and we offered to share that with Fiser
Speaker 1: and with all humanity to understand what the effects of
Speaker 1: mass inoculations are. The most important thing, I think the
Speaker 1: most pressing thing is the question of what real degree
Speaker 1: not only of personal protection you get from vaccines, but
Speaker 1: what is the level of preventing infections when you receive
Speaker 1: the inoculation. That's critical question obviously, as you want to
Speaker 1: open the economy and restore life to normal. Netania Who's
Speaker 1: deal vaccines for data, did raise some questions within Israel
Speaker 1: about safeguarding patient information, but the country is uniquely positioned
Speaker 1: for this type of experiment. Four large HMOs manage its
Speaker 1: universal health care system, and about of citizens have digital
Speaker 1: health records that go back as many as twenty years.
Speaker 1: Ben Rice, who directs the Predictive Medicine Group at the
Speaker 1: Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School,
Speaker 1: told me Israel's system enables radical integration of health data
Speaker 1: into one place. Since d H and MOS in Israel
Speaker 1: provide the healthcare, provide the vaccination services, and the coronavirus
Speaker 1: testing services, all this data could be integrated into one
Speaker 1: anonymized record to track the real effects of vaccines. Researchers
Speaker 1: needed to use this extremely detailed data on a massive scale.
Speaker 1: Rice and a team of other researchers from Harvard and Klalite,
Speaker 1: the policy arm of Israel's biggest HMO, set out to
Speaker 1: solve the problem. Fiser wasn't involved with their project. So
Speaker 1: in order to conduct such a study, you need a
Speaker 1: very specific set of circumstances that will happen. It's Noah Taken,
Speaker 1: director of Data and AI driven Medicine at Kluit and
Speaker 1: one of the lead researchers on the study. First, you
Speaker 1: have to have information about a community based cohort of
Speaker 1: individuals for which you know all background medical information, and
Speaker 1: for the same cohort of individuals, you need to know
Speaker 1: several things. You need to know which of these are
Speaker 1: being tested for COVID nineteen, the PCR results. You'll have
Speaker 1: to know the results of those tests. You have to
Speaker 1: know who got vaccinated at at what date, and you
Speaker 1: have to know what happened to them. And that means
Speaker 1: that you have to have an integrated data source that
Speaker 1: takes all of these different resources together, because usually hospital
Speaker 1: data is collected in one electronical medical record, and laboratory
Speaker 1: results are collected in another setting, and the community electronical
Speaker 1: medical record is the third setting, and all these together
Speaker 1: are needed in order to do that. In Israel, the
Speaker 1: Ministry of Health created a reporting system that asks everyone
Speaker 1: to record COVID nineteen test results, hospitalizations, and degrees of
Speaker 1: severity of hospitalization. That gave Noah and the team two
Speaker 1: data sets to work with, the h m MOS decades
Speaker 1: of health data and the government's detailed pandemic data. And
Speaker 1: when we cross these two resources together, we can actually
Speaker 1: know where each patient is and what happened to them
Speaker 1: in order to tell how well the vaccine was working.
Speaker 1: The team needed as unbiased a comparison between the vaccinated
Speaker 1: and unvaccinated as possible. They needed to match up each
Speaker 1: inoculated person with someone as similar as possible who hadn't
Speaker 1: yet gotten a shot. So as an example, for you,
Speaker 1: to be matched in the study, you have to find
Speaker 1: someone was very similar to you. So a seventies six
Speaker 1: year old ultra Orthodox Jewish male from specific neighborhoods from
Speaker 1: Tel Aviv who received four influenza vaccines in the last
Speaker 1: five years and has two common abilities that are known
Speaker 1: risk factors for severe corby nineteen will only be matched
Speaker 1: in the study if we can find a similar ultra
Speaker 1: Orthodox Jewish mail from the same neighborhood who's aged seventy
Speaker 1: six to seventy seven years and received three to four
Speaker 1: influenza vaccine and has two common abilities. It was a
Speaker 1: computing challenge. Every day from December twentie to February one,
Speaker 1: the team matched each newly vaccinated person with an unvaccinated control.
Speaker 1: So I can tell you that the first iteration of
Speaker 1: code that we've written took four or five days just
Speaker 1: to run to run it, not to write it. And
Speaker 1: we wrote that piece of code in different languages and
Speaker 1: with different algorithms again and again until if we reduced
Speaker 1: the running times from five days to one day, and
Speaker 1: from one day to four or five hours, and in
Speaker 1: the final version to ten or fifteen minutes, and that
Speaker 1: that's the current version that we're using now, and we
Speaker 1: are rerunning every few days to see what what's the
Speaker 1: status with the information that is gradually building. Ultimately, the
Speaker 1: team was able to compare five hundred and ninety six thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred and eighteen people vaccinated between December and February
Speaker 1: one with their unvaccinated counterparts added together almost one point
Speaker 1: two million people in all. Published on February in the
Speaker 1: New England Journal of Medicine, their results were overwhelmingly positive.
Speaker 1: Two doses of the vaccine prevented of symptomatic COVID nineteen cases.
Speaker 1: Once the team counted people who hadn't had symptoms but
Speaker 1: tested positive for the virus anyway, they found two doses
Speaker 1: prevented of the documented infections, and importantly, it showed the
Speaker 1: vaccine was also extremely effective for people who are older
Speaker 1: or who have other diseases. Here's Ron Ballaser, director of
Speaker 1: health policy planning for Klalite, and we've been able to
Speaker 1: demonstrate that the vaccine is exceedingly effective as it was
Speaker 1: in the clinical trial. This study that was performed in
Speaker 1: Israel at Kalite, would be able to demonstrate for decision
Speaker 1: makers and the public worldwide that mass vaccination campaigns have
Speaker 1: a huge potential in controlling the illness globally, as well
Speaker 1: as curbing the detrimental impact of disease dissemination on human lives.
Speaker 1: Ron told me that he hopes at some point the
Speaker 1: study won't be able to continue because they'll run out
Speaker 1: of unvaccinated people to use as control comparisons, But for now,
Speaker 1: the team is continuing as their study population grows. They
Speaker 1: hope to answer questions about how specific groups of people
Speaker 1: respond to the vaccine and help CLAD and other health
Speaker 1: providers know how to handle COVID nineteen immunizations for those groups.
Speaker 1: Here's no one part of clear It's head of epidemiology
Speaker 1: and research, so we constantly gather data so we have
Speaker 1: the biggest possible result pool with which to to inform
Speaker 1: decisions within the organization. Also for subgroups. So for example,
Speaker 1: what we do have a huge sympathize for the overall population,
Speaker 1: maybe we specifically want to know what is happening with
Speaker 1: people who are immuno compromise with people who have certain
Speaker 1: remote with conditions. So we do continue to gather these
Speaker 1: data daily to have better and better hands. But for now,
Speaker 1: at the end of this long dark winter of seemingly
Speaker 1: unending pandemic anxiety, we were finally given something really solid
Speaker 1: to cheer about, real world evidence that the vaccine is
Speaker 1: working and perhaps even better than people thought, because it
Speaker 1: seems to prevent not just infection with COVID, but also
Speaker 1: transmission of the virus. That was Naomi Kraski. And that's
Speaker 1: it for our show. To day for coverage of the
Speaker 1: outbreak from one and twenty bureaus across the world, visit
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more
Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is
Speaker 1: produced by Tophor foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson.
Speaker 1: Today's main story was reported by Naomi Kresky. Original music
Speaker 1: by Leo Cedrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi.
Speaker 1: Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of punk casts. Thanks for listening.