SANTIAGO (REUTERS) - Sinovac's Covid-19 vaccine CoronaVac was 67 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic infection in the first real-world study of the Chinese shot, the Chilean government said on Friday (April 16).

The vaccine was 85 per cent effective in preventing hospitalisations and 80 per cent effective in preventing deaths, the government said in a report prepared by the Chilean health ministry.

The release of the data makes Chile one of a handful of countries, including the United Kingdom and Israel, that have used inoculation campaigns to gather insights into how effective vaccines are outside controlled clinical trials and when faced with unpredictable variables in societies.

Israel's real-world study of the effectiveness of Pfizer's vaccine looked at the results among 1.2 million people, a mix of those who received the shot and those who did not.

Chile's study examined CoronaVac's effectiveness among 10.5 million people, again looking both at people who had been vaccinated and those who had not.

The data compares favourably to previous data released on CoronaVac's efficacy in clinical trials.

In early January, Brazilian researchers said CoronaVac had a "clinical efficacy" of 78 per cent against "mild-to-severe" Covid-19 cases in late-stage trials. They later added in a group of "very mild" infections, and said general effectiveness was 50.4 per cent.

Indonesia gave the vaccine emergency use approval based on interim data showing it was 65 per cent effective.

In a Turkish trial, CoronaVac had an efficacy in preventing symptomatic infection of 83.5 per cent, and 100 per cent in preventing severe illness and hospitalisation.