"I believe Israel has become the world's lab right now because they are using only our vaccine at this state and they have vaccinated a very big part of their population, so we can study both economy and health indices," said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during an interview given to NBC News on Friday.
"What we've seen is that the vaccine efficacy in real-world data is getting higher as we speak, following the second vaccination, so seven days compared to 14 days post-second vaccination, there is a difference in efficacy," Bourla claimed.
When asked whether one could infect others after receiving two doses of the vaccine, he said: "It is something that needs to be confirmed, and the real-world data that we are getting from Israel and other studies will help us understand this better.
"But there are a lot of indicators right now that are telling us that there is a protection against the transmission of the disease," Bourla added.
Bourla further noted that studies on the risk of the vaccine are also underway on pregnant women and younger children.
"We have already licensed for kids 16 and above... we are already doing trials for kids between 11 years old all the way to 16, and I hope that we will be able to have data in a couple of months. We are also planning to initiate pediatric studies from a younger age, from age 5 all the way to 11. And I believe we should have data about this population by the end of the year," Bourla said, according to NBC.
Regarding how long the protection remains after receiving both doses of the vaccine, Bourla said current data shows that after six months the protection is robust, but we need to wait until a year in order to determine if it remains for the full year.
The NBC interview also made mention of the recent Israeli study regarding the effectiveness of the vaccine, with Bourla noting that the data came largely from a younger population. He said it remains a high risk to rely on only one dose of the vaccine to combat the coronavirus. Tobias Siegal contributed to this report.