Vaccination

What? 

This research theme will investigate vaccine coverage, efficacy, and safety.

Why?

• Vaccine coverage will describe trends and variation in coverage by geographic area, and between key clinical and demographic patient groups.   
• Vaccine efficacy will assess the out-of-trial effectiveness of (at least) one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine administered as part of the COVID-19 vaccination programme in England to patients aged 70 and over. The vaccine effectiveness of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca brands will be assessed separately, and in specific clinical subgroups. 
• Vaccine Safety related work will investigate prevalence of blood clots and risk factors for blood clots among COVID-19 vaccine recipients in England. The risk:benefit assessment of vaccination for younger adults and the risk of blood clots, transverse myelitis and Bell’s palsy following COVID-19 vaccination, using self-controlled case series and cohort study designs. 

How?

This will be achieved using OpenSAFELY , a new secure analytics platform for electronic health records in the NHS, created to deliver urgent results during the global COVID-19 emergency that is now successfully delivering analyses across more than 58 million patients’ full pseudonymised primary care NHS records.

Contacts: Dr Ben Goldacre ben.goldacre@phc.ox.ac.uk, Professor Ian Douglas Ian.DOUGLAS@lshtm.ac.uk

OpenSAFELY