A study on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness that was blocked from a government health publication has been published by JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal.
The vaccine was found to be about 55% effective against COVID-19-associated hospitalizations and reduced COVID-19-related trips to emergency departments and urgent care clinics by 50%, according to the study published Tuesday.
The research had originally been scheduled to appear this spring in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC's flagship publication. It had been cleared by the agency's Office of Science but was flagged by acting agency director Jay Bhattacharya. Althea Grant-Lenzy, the CDC's chief science officer, said in a recent interview that his decision did not mean the paper would never be published, but rather that the authors had to take time to address his concerns. The authors then had the freedom to take the study to outside journals.
Bhattacharya argued the study's methodology, called test-negative design, relies too heavily on assumptions and could produce results skewed by factors such as prior infections and how different groups of patients behave. The approach looks at people admitted to hospitals or who visited emergency rooms with respiratory illnesses, checks whether patients were vaccinated, and then calculates the odds of a positive COVID-19 test among vaccinated patients versus those who were unvaccinated.
Many public health researchers maintain it is a reliable design used for decades. Papers using that methodology have been published, after review by experts in the field, in journals including Pediatrics and the New England Journal of Medicine. Proponents say the methodology is built to address differences related to who seeks care, and argue that prior infection should not be much of an issue because so many Americans have already been infected by the coronavirus.
According to ABC News, researchers have repeatedly found that COVID-19 vaccines work, making the findings themselves not particularly surprising. But the paper drew public attention after Trump administration political appointees decided not to run it in the CDC publication.
"It is critical that we continue to characterize and publish estimates of vaccine effectiveness in populations with changing immunity against evolving viral strains," wrote Natalie Dean, an Emory University biostatistics expert, in a commentary that accompanied the study's publication Tuesday.
