A team of researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed more than 80 studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccine over the original series. Their findings, based on 150 million patient observations, support the effectiveness of both monovalent and bivalent boosters in preventing severe outcomes and emphasize the importance of annual vaccine updates.
A new study highlights the important benefits of monovalent and bivalent. covid 19 It advocates timely changes to match vaccination coverage, which promotes prevention of hospitalizations and deaths Virus Alternatives.
Primary catalysts, secondary catalysts, monovalent, bivalent. Like SARS-CoV-2 Virus strains, vaccines to fight the virus are always changing and can be confusing.
Looking at different vaccines, their effectiveness, and the methods used worldwide to study vaccine effectiveness, a team of University of Michigan researchers led by Sabir Meh and Bhramar Mukherjee reviewed about 80 studies and 150 studies. Millions of observations from patient data sets around the world to understand the different designs and methods used to study the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines following primary series vaccination.
They then applied all the methods used in those studies to patient data from Michigan Medicine.
Meh holds a master’s degree in biostatistics and is currently a biostatistician at Michigan Medicine School of Public Health in Urology. Mukherjee is the John D. Kalbfleisch Distinguished University Professor of Biostatistics, the Siobhan Harlow College Professor of Public Health, and the Vice President for Research in the Office of the Vice President for Research.
“What we’ve been able to create is a repository of methods that can be applied to future annual vaccines,” Mukherjee said. Robust and reproducible results and reliable estimates of vaccine efficacy are essential to strengthen public confidence and combat misinformation.
Their full study is available in Advances in science. Meah explains more.
From the patient data you reviewed, can you explain your findings around bivalent and monovalent stimulants?
In our study, we evaluated three different vaccine regimens: 1) a monovalent booster targeting the first strain, 2) a second monovalent booster with the same formulation as the first, and 3) a new bivalent vaccine updated in fall 2022 to target new Omicron variants. We found that all dose series provided significant benefits in terms of preventing hospitalizations and deaths, and that the 2022 OMRON-specific vaccine dose was stronger than estimates from international studies we looked at.
These findings support the practice of regularly updating Covid-19 vaccines for currently circulating variants. Fortunately, in the U.S. and many other countries, such as the European Union, we seem to be getting updated COVID-19 vaccines every year. In the year The fall 2022 vaccine has already succeeded, a new vaccine updated in 2023, which you can still get in early 2024, if you haven’t already, even targeting the new XBB1.5 Omicron variant.
We conclude that using updated vaccines, not only the fall 2022 bivalent vaccine, but further monitoring and research into the real-world effectiveness of annual vaccination is still necessary, and we expect that any updated covid-19 vaccine should be universal. We hope that the findings of our study will help these studies. What we have been able to do is establish an analytical pipeline through which researchers can study the vaccine efficacy of future annual vaccine formulations.
Can you describe what biostatistics brings to the table on this topic?
Biostatistics and epidemiology provide a toolbox for the complex process of evaluating vaccine efficacy in scientific observational studies. However, there are many different approaches: both in study design and those employed by researchers in vaccine effectiveness studies around the world, which lead us to examine their methods and results and the following case studies. These methods using Michigan drug data.
Fortunately, a key finding of our study is that estimates of vaccine effectiveness are relatively stable and do not depend on the methods chosen for hospitalization and mortality outcomes. We did not observe this important property for infection outcomes, but hospitalizations and deaths are arguably the most important study endpoints as we move toward the epidemiology phase.
Considering what your study says about the power of covid-19 boosters to prevent severe illness and hospitalization, what do you want 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 annual vaccines approved by the FDA, but it is important to study ongoing vaccines, and our findings provide some important points for these future studies.
Reference: “Design and Analysis of Effectiveness to Improve Diversity in a Covid-19 Surveillance Study: A Review and Case Study” by Sabir Meh, Shu Shi, Lars G. Fritsch, Maxwell Salvatore, Abram Wagner, Emily T. Martin and Bhramar Mukherjee, 20 December 2023; Advances in science.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3747
Co-authors: Xu Shi, Lars Fritsche, Maxwell Salvatore, Abram Wagner, Emily Martin, all of U.M. Their disciplinary collaborations are part of the School of Public Health’s IDEAS, Interdisciplinary Discovery, Engagement + Actions for Community initiative.