First movers, moment boosters, monovalent, bivalent. Like the SARS-CoV-2 strain of the virus, vaccines to fight the virus are evolving and can be confusing.
In an effort to better understand the variety of vaccines and strategies used globally to examine their efficacy, an organization of researchers at the University of Michigan, led by Sabir Meah and Bhramar Mukherjee, evaluated some 80 studies and 150 million observations from patient datasets around the world. global. global to perceive the other models and strategies that have been used to examine the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccine doses after the first vaccination. Their study published in Science Advances.
They then implemented all of the strategies used in those studies on Michigan Medicine patient data.
Meah is an alumnus of the School of Public Health with a master’s degree in biostatistics and most recently a biostatistician in urology at Michigan Medicine. Mukherjee is a distinguished professor of biostatistics at John D. University. Kalbfleish, Professor of Public Health at Sioban Harlow College and Assistant Professor for Research at the Office of the Vice President for Research.
“What we have been able to create is a repository of strategies that can be implemented for annual vaccines in the long term,” Mukherjee said. “Having robust, reproducible effects and reliable estimates of vaccine effectiveness is vital to solidifying public acceptance as true and fighting misinformation. “
Meah explains:
In our study, we evaluated 3 other vaccination regimens: 1) the monovalent booster targeting the original strain, 2) the second monovalent booster also with the original formulation, and 3) the new bivalent vaccine updated in fall 2022 to target new omicron variants. We found that all sequential doses provided really broad benefits in terms of preventing hospitalizations and deaths, and the omicron-specific vaccine dose estimates for fall 2022 were stronger than those from the global studies we reviewed.
These findings reflect the practice of regularly updating COVID-19 vaccines for lately circulating variants. Fortunately, it seems that in the U. S. In the U. S. and many other countries, such as those in the European Union, we will get updated COVID-19 vaccines each. yearly. The fall 2022 vaccine has already been replaced by a new updated vaccine in fall 2023, which you can still receive right now in early 2024, if you haven’t already, targeting the even newer XBB1. 5 omicron variant. .
We expect that our conclusions on the utility of updating vaccines should generalize to any updated COVID-19 vaccine, not just the fall 2022 bivalent vaccine, but additional monitoring and study of the real-world effectiveness of an annual vaccine is still necessary, and we hope that the findings of our research can aid these studies. What we have been able to do is to establish an analytic pipeline where researchers can study the vaccine effectiveness of future annual vaccine formulations.
Biostatistics and epidemiology provide a toolbox for the complex procedure of comparing vaccine efficacy in observational clinical studies. However, there are other approaches, both in the design of the studies and in the strategies that researchers have used in the vaccine efficacy studies conducted. around the world, which motivated us to continue our review of their method and results, as well as an upcoming case study, using Michigan Medicine’s knowledge.
Fortunately, one of the key findings of our study is that estimates of vaccine efficacy remain robust and do not rely heavily on the choice of strategies for hospitalization and mortality outcomes. We have not observed these benefits for infection outcomes, but hospitalization and death are arguably much more important questions of examination as we move into the endemic phase of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 vaccines tested in our study, coupled with the fall 2022 bivalent vaccine, provided robust coverage against hospitalization and death. We expect this trend to continue with more FDA-approved annual vaccines, but continued long-term vaccine studies are warranted, and our effects provide questions of attention for those long-term studies.
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