HAVING a Covid vaccination means you are substantially less likely to be admitted to hospital with the virus, a study has found.

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.

Scientists from 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 per cent and 94 per cent, respectively, they found.

Lead researcher of the Scotland vaccine study 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-19 hospitalisations.”

Dr Jim McMenamin, national Covid-19 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.”

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The Government now hopes to have vaccinated all of the adult population of the UK by July 31.

The new targets will be seen as a sign of increasing confidence within Government that the vaccine supply will remain steady over the coming months.

More than 17.2 million people have now received their first dose of a vaccine at one of the 1,500 vaccination sites across the country, and 600,000 have received their second.