OREANDA-NEWS. The results of an independent study made by researchers from St. Petersburg confirm that the Russian Sputnik V vaccine is effective against the delta variant of the coronavirus and safely protects against the severe form of COVID-19. The article was published on the medRxiv preprint server. The work is reported by Science magazine.

The study was carried out on nearly 14,000 patients having symptoms of coronavirus infection and a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. They were examined by computed tomography in medical centers in St. Petersburg. Of these, 1291 people were fully vaccinated at least two weeks before the survey.

Scientists note that they did not consider cases of partial vaccination, and also did not compare the effect of different vaccines, but proceeded from the fact that the vast majority of those vaccinated in St. Petersburg - about 96 percent - were vaccinated by the Sputnik V vaccine.

The results showed that the vaccine decreased the possibility of hospitalization by 81 percent, and helped to prevent dangerous lung damage 76 percent of the time. The scientists did not directly assess the percentage of complete protection against COVID-19 or its mild forms, but the researchers' estimates demonstrate that the effectiveness of the Sputnik V vaccine against any symptomatic signes of COVID-19 is about 50 percent.

"We were able to obtain these rather unique data, because no one in the world seems to perform as many computed tomography scans for patients with mild diseases as Russia," the research leader, epidemiologist Anton Barchuk from the European University at St. Petersburg.

It is with the delta strain of coronavirus that most of the so-called "breakthrough" cases of covid are associated in the world, when the infection bypasses the protection created by vaccines. "Our data confirm that one of the benefits of vaccination is to reduce the severity of the disease in cases of breakthrough," says Barchuk.