In
Clinical Coversations, Dr. Ronen Arbel, senior author on a paper just published in the
New England Journal of Medicine, discusses his work with Joe Elia and Dr. Ali Raja.
Governments' directives about how and when to vaccinate people who've recovered from COVID-19 vary widely. And, according to this episode's guest, Dr. Ronen Arbel, they all say they don't have enough evidence to set firm policy. So, Dr. 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 their electronic records were followed over a period of some 9 months. Dr. Arbel's group 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…