COVID-19 Vaccine
The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed over 3 million lives worldwide and close to 800,000 in the U.S. alone. Healthcare workers are on the frontlines of the pandemic and have been at increased risk for exposure to SARS-CoV-2 through interactions in the workplace, as well as in the community. The PReventing Emerging Infections through Vaccine EffectiveNess Testing (PREVENT) Project is currently measuring the comparative effectiveness of available COVID-19 vaccines by conducting an observational study of health care personnel who develop symptoms of COVID-19 in 16 academic US medical centers.
This project is being conducted by EMERGEncy ID NET, a CDC-collaborative emergency department-based emerging infectious disease sentinel network. The goals of this project are to 1) evaluate effectiveness of a complete schedule of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in preventing laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19; 2) estimate the effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in preventing severe disease among those with laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19; and to evaluate the effectiveness by subgroups.
UMass Chan is one of the top producing stites for the PREVENT project. To date this work, which is the largest multi-site vaccine effectiveness evaluation among healthcare personnel, demonstrated that vaccination with either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines is highly effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, consistent with the results of phase III trials and providing additional support to the accruing evidence through observational studies.