[ad_1]
A team of researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed more than 80 studies to evaluate the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine doses beyond the primary series. Their findings, based on 150 million patient observations, support the effectiveness of monovalent and bivalent boosters in preventing serious outcomes and underline the importance of annual vaccine updates.
New research highlighted the important benefits of monovalents and bivalents. COVID-19 boosters to prevent hospitalization and death, advocating for regular updating of vaccines to match those in circulation virus variants.
First reinforcements, second reinforcements, monovalent, bivalent. Same as him SARS-CoV-2 Because of the strain of the virus, vaccines to combat the virus are always changing and may be confusing.
With the aim of better understanding the variety of vaccines, their effectiveness and observing the methods used globally to study the effectiveness of vaccines, a group of researchers from the University of Michigan, led by Sabir Meah and Bhramar Mukherjee, evaluated about 80 studies and 150 million observations of patient data sets from around the world to understand the various designs and methods that were used to study the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccine doses after the primary vaccination series.
They then applied all the methods used in those studies to Michigan Medicine patient data.
Meah is an alumnus of the School of Public Health with a master’s degree in Biostatistics and currently a biostatistician in Urology at Michigan Medicine. Mukherjee is the John D. Kalbfleish University Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics, Sioban Harlow Collegiate Professor of Public Health, and assistant vice president for research in the Office of the Vice President for Research.
“What we have been able to create is a repository of methods that can be applied for future annual vaccines,” Mukherjee said. “It is important to have robust, reproducible results and reliable estimates of vaccine effectiveness to solidify public trust and combat misinformation.”
His complete study is available at Scientific advances. Meah explains more.
From the patient data you reviewed, could you explain your findings on bivalent and monovalent reinforcers?
In our study, we evaluated three different 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 the newer variants of Omicron. We saw that all sequential doses provided substantial benefit in terms of preventing hospitalization and death, and the fall 2022 Omicron-specific vaccine dose estimates were stronger in the global studies we analyzed.
These findings support the practice of periodically updating COVID-19 vaccines for currently circulating variants. Fortunately, it appears that in the US and many other countries, such as those in the European Union, we will receive updated COVID-19 vaccines on an annual basis. The fall 2022 vaccine has already been replaced by a new updated vaccine in fall 2023, which you can still get now in early 2024 if you haven’t already, targeting the even newer XBB1.5 Omicron variant.
We expect our conclusions about the usefulness of updating vaccines to generalize to any updated COVID-19 vaccine, not just the fall 2022 bivalent vaccine, but additional follow-up and study of the real-world effectiveness of an annual vaccine, and we believe that we hope that our research findings can help these studies. What we have been able to do is establish an analysis pipeline where researchers can study the effectiveness of future annual vaccine formulations.
Could you describe what biostatistics contributes to this topic?
Biostatistics and epidemiology provide a toolbox for the complex process of evaluating vaccine effectiveness in observational scientific studies. However, there are quite a few different approaches, both in study design and in the methods that researchers have used in vaccine efficacy studies conducted around the world, which motivated us to conduct our review of their methodology and results and subsequent case study of these methods use data from Michigan Medicine.
Fortunately, a key finding of our study was that vaccine efficacy estimates remain relatively stable and are not highly dependent on the choice of methods for hospitalization and mortality outcomes. We did not observe this advantageous property for infection outcomes, but hospitalization and death are arguably much more important points of study as we move toward the endemic stage of the pandemic.
Given what your research says about the power of COVID-19 boosters to prevent serious illness and hospitalizations, what would you like this study to convey to the public?
The COVID-19 vaccines examined in our study, including the fall 2022 bivalent vaccine, provided strong protection against hospitalization and death. We expect this pattern to continue with additional FDA-approved annual vaccines, but continued study of future vaccines is warranted, and our findings provide some important points to consider for these future studies.
Reference: “Heterogeneity of design and analysis in observational studies on COVID-19 booster effectiveness: a review and case study” by Sabir Meah, Xu Shi, Lars G. Fritsche, Maxwell Salvatore, Abram Wagner, Emily T. Martin and Bhramar Mukherjee, December 20, 2023, Scientific advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3747
Co-authors: Xu Shi, Lars Fritsche, Maxwell Salvatore, Abram Wagner, Emily Martin, all UM. Their interdisciplinary collaboration is part of the School of Public Health’s IDEAS, Interdisciplinary Discovery, Commitment + Actions for Society initiative.