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Study: Moderna slightly better at blocking COVID-19 than Pfizer/BioNTech

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week found that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine performed slightly better than the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in lowering the risk of infection and hospitalization.

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Researchers from Harvard University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs looked at electronic medical records of nearly 440,000 veterans who had received two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine between Jan. 4 to May 14, 2021, then they tracked the veterans through the original — or alpha — COVID-19 infection and the delta variant.

Researchers found that those who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 27% more likely to get infected with the virus than those who received the Moderna vaccine. Those who received the Pfizer vaccine were 70% more likely to end up hospitalized, according to researchers.

During the alpha surge in the spring, case rates for Pfizer were 5.75 per 1,000 compared with 4.52 per 1,000 for Moderna.

Researchers stressed that both vaccines are highly effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19. The difference in protection against the virus offered by each vaccine is very small, those connected to the study stressed.

“Both vaccines are incredibly effective, with only rare breakthrough cases,” said study co-author Juan Casas, MD, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a Harvard associate professor, in a VA news release.

“But regardless of the predominant strain—Alpha earlier and then Delta later—Moderna was shown to be slightly more effective.”