Enhanced Vaccine Effectiveness during the Delta Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Medicare Population Supports a Multilayered Prevention Approach

Bettina Experton; Adrien Elena; Christopher S Hein; Dale Nordenberg; Peter Walker; Blake Schwendiman; Christopher R Burrow

doi:10.3390/biology11121700

Enhanced Vaccine Effectiveness during the Delta Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Medicare Population Supports a Multilayered Prevention Approach

Biology (Basel). 2022 Nov 24;11(12):1700. doi: 10.3390/biology11121700.

Authors

Bettina Experton¹, Adrien Elena¹, Christopher S Hein¹, Dale Nordenberg², Peter Walker³, Blake Schwendiman¹, Christopher R Burrow¹

Affiliations

¹ Humetrix Inc., Del Mar, CA 90214, USA.
² Thriive, Inc., Bronx, NY 10463, USA.
³ US Navy, Washington, DC 20376, USA.

Abstract

Throughout the pandemic, individuals 65 years and older have contributed most COVID-19 related deaths. To best formulate effective vaccination and other prevention policies to protect older adults, large scale observational studies of these higher risk individuals are needed. We conducted a Vaccine Effectiveness (VE) study during the B.1.617.2 Delta variant phase of the pandemic in July and August 2021 in a cohort of 17 million Medicare beneficiaries of which 5.7 million were fully vaccinated. We found that individuals fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 and Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccines in January 2021 had 2.5 times higher breakthrough infections and hospitalizations than those fully vaccinated in March 2021, consistent with waning of vaccine-induced immunity. Measuring VE weekly, we found that VE against hospitalization, and even more so against infection, increased from July 2021 through August 2021, suggesting that in addition to the protective role of vaccination, increased masking or social distancing might have contributed to the unexpected increase in VE. Ongoing monitoring of Medicare beneficiaries should be a priority as new variants continue to emerge, and the VE of the new bivalent vaccines remains to be established. This could be accomplished with a large Medicare claims database and the analytics platform used for this study.

Keywords: B.1.617.2; BNT162b2 vaccine; COVID-19/breakthrough infection; COVID-19/epidemiology/prevention & control; Delta variant; Medicare; SARS CoV-2; aged 65 and over; mRNA-1273 vaccine; multilayered prevention; vaccine effectiveness.

Grants and funding

The analyses reported in this paper were solely funded by Humetrix. Prior to this, Humetrix was funded by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory under a prime contract with the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and by ECS Federal LLC, part of ASGN Incorporated, under a separate prime contract of the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.