The covid vaccine is working "spectacularly well" and Scots should be optimistic about the future, a major report has concluded.
Among the over-80s in Scotland there has been an overall 81% reduction in the numbers admitted to hospital.
Scientists from two Scottish universities found the vaccination programme has been linked to a substantial reduction in hospital admissions north of the border.
Researchers examined coronavirus hospital admissions in Scotland among people who have had their first jab and compared them with those who had not yet received a dose of the vaccine.
Experts from rom the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strathclyde and Public Health Scotland examined data on people who had received either the Pfizer/BioNTech jab or the one developed by experts at the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca.
By the fourth week after receiving the initial dose, the Pfizer and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines were shown to reduce the risk of hospital admission from Covid-19 by up to 85% and 94%, respectively, they found.
Professor Aziz Sheikh, director of the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, said: “These results are very encouraging and have given us great reasons to be optimistic for the future.
“We now have national evidence – across an entire country – that vaccination provides protection against covid hospitalisations.”
Dr Jim McMenamin, national covid incident director at Public Health Scotland, said: “These results are important as we move from expectation to firm evidence of benefit from vaccines.
“Across the Scottish population the results show a substantial effect on reducing the risk of admission to hospital from a single dose of vaccine.
“For anyone offered the vaccine I encourage them to get vaccinated.”
Chris Robertson, professor of public health epidemiology at the University of Strathclyde, said: “These early national results give a reason to be more optimistic about the control of the epidemic.”
Dr Josie Murray of Public Health Scotland said the results do not have any bearing on the virus’s ability to transmit from person to person and did not advise any changes.
She said: “The first thing to say about these results is that the current vaccination programme shows from these data very likely to be preventing severe illness related to covid.
“I think it’s really important to emphasise that these data don’t support any comment about transmission or indeed transmission policy and therefore we wouldn’t be advising on the basis of these results that we should alter anything that we’ve got implemented currently to stop transmission of the virus from person to person within Scotland.
“The brilliant news is that the vaccine delivery programme in its current format is suggesting that it’s working.”
