image:
Image Caption: Coauthors Masayuki Yazawa & Lauren Qiu wearing masks at their microscopy room used for this study.
Credit: Image Credit: Masayuki Yazawa (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Coronavirus envelope protein is a drug target for new platform for the identification and optimization of peptides against SARS-CoV-2
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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002522
Article Title: Developing inhibitory peptides against SARS-CoV-2 envelope protein
Author Countries: United States
Funding: This work was supported by Columbia University Deans Office Fund and Columbia University Translational Therapeutics (TRx) Pilot Award (to M.Y.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Experimental study
Cells
Competing interests: I have read the journals policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: M.Y., R.B., K.Y., D.D.H., M.S.N., and Y.H. (inventors) filed a patent (Attorney Docket No.: 01001/00889-US0; status: Filed, 04/13/2022) related to this manuscript. This patent is for using synthetic peptides targeting SARS-CoV-2 envelope protein for treating COVID-19 and related human coronaviruses. The rest of the authors declare no competing interests.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, left, accompanied by President Donald Trump, speaks about the coronavirus during a news conference in the press briefing room at the White House, Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Some time in the future, there will be another pandemic. Here are two very useful things to keep in mind when it happens again.
One might think that it was perhaps in the best interest of our country to slightly exaggerate the mortality rate of Covid or the effectiveness of the vaccine. If an infectious disease seems scarier than it is, we might be able to avoid many more deaths because individuals will be more willing to comply with safety restrictions and to take the vaccine. Anthony Fauci was guilty of a white lie when he initially recommended against masking to avoid a shortage of masks, which were needed by hospitals. The first thing to note about this is the objectionable level of paternalism involved.
But setting that aside, we can question whether this white lie strategy is actually in our best interest. Theres a strong case to be made that it isnt. When people start noticing inconsistencies in what officials are telling them, there is an inevitable erosion of confidence in the advice of the experts. For better or worse, once experts are thought of as liars, even their sensible and objectively accurate advice is brought into question.
Theres no doubt that at least part of the misinformation produced by experts was a result of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic. Sometimes, the experts just didnt have the answers and this caused them to guess. When they later contradicted themselves, it caused a loss in public trust. The right approach would have been to publicly acknowledge the uncertainty behind the recommendation and make it clear that they could change as more evidence was gathered.
The lesson here is that experts and the government should tell the truth. So much of our knowledge of the world comes from what the experts tell us. Its absolutely necessary that the public maintains a certain level of respect for the opinions of doctors, scientists, and economists. We cant pour through the data ourselves so we need to trust experts so that we can make reasonable decisions about our safety. Once the public becomes overly skeptical of expert opinion, they turn to dubious fringe theories, which can have disastrous consequences.
Another question many have asked is, does the government have the right to force us to use vaccines or to implement a lockdown? Well, strictly speaking the US never implemented compulsory vaccinations. But you could very easily argue that when you are restricted from participating in the goods of society by refusing the vaccine, it is just another form of coercion precisely because it imposes a costly penalty.
A substantial segment of the population argued that the lockdowns and vaccine requirements were unjustified because COVID deaths were exaggerated and mostly affected those of old age or with several comorbidities. Why should the rest of us have to lock down and take the vaccine?
This was by far one of the most bizarre sorts of arguments that were seriously advanced during the pandemic. I take it that those who think that this is a good argument are being guided by some libertarian intuition. Something like what is known as the Non-Aggression Principle: it is wrong to force others to do something against their will. Its wrong to coerce people against their will and so its wrong to force others to quarantine or to take the vaccine.
The problem is that this principle is clearly false. Unless you just love dirt roads, we need to coerce people into paying taxes to fund infrastructure and the other goods of society. We also need to use coercion to enforce laws, particularly when it involves violent criminals. Of course, someone who refuses to take the vaccine or to obey safety restrictions is not quite like a violent criminal.
But the rationale is the same, that is, the government duty to protect public safety. This duty isnt unrestricted. For example, the government would not be justified in locking the country down in the name of public safety because some people die of food poisoning after eating at a restaurant.
This doesnt mean that all of the government responses to the pandemic were justified. Its likely that a subset of them were not. Im only arguing against the thought that restrictions went too far either because death projections were overly pessimistic or because young and healthy people were at a much lower risk of death. The government would be justified in jailing a drunk driver even if they were themselves relatively safe riding in a tank.
In future pandemics, whether a lock down or vaccine requirement is justified depends on whether failing to implement them would impose excessive risk to public safety and whether the economic costs outstrip the benefits, not on whether you yourself are at risk.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.
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On a clear April day in the summer of 2020, the peaks of the Dhauladhar mountains in Himachal Pradesh were visible from distant Jalandhar as the lockdown imposed on March 25 sent pollution levels plummeting, leaving the skies clear. Sadly, it would be the only bright spot for the next two years as the worst pandemic to hit humanity in a hundred years ravaged through the country. Its destructive trail left death and destruction all around with deliverance a distant dream.
But the nightmare did end with the promise that never again would we let such a man-made calamity hit us.Yet, four years later all that lingers of that period are piles of unused Covid test kits, masks and other useless paraphernalia like vegetable washing liquids that remind of how even in that darkest hour, companies thought only of profiting from our collective insecurities. How quickly we have forgotten the dark relentless hopelessness that bored into our collective souls!
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With another Lok Sabha election just weeks away, the pandemic should have been right up there, as an election issue. But it is off the map as far as political debates on television and in print are concerned. No one is questioning how we dealt with the pandemic and the horrors of its aftermath. Even the opposition is pretending that it never happened.
Conservatively, a million lives were lost.
The visual horror of dead bodies piled high waiting for a turn in the burning ghats or the half burnt bodies floating in rivers across the nation has been wiped out. Forgotten also is our passivity. Mute, helpless witnesses to this ravaging we couldn't help anyone.
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India wasn't the only country to flounder and flail in the wake of this scourge. Even in the worlds richest nation, the US, the hollowness of the healthcare system was shown up as it simply crumpled under the onslaught of the Covid virus. Who can forget the crazed hunt for just one oxygen cylinder for a parent on death bed or that one vial of Remdesivir and Ivermectin transported across the length and breadth of the country to save a life?
Of advice we had plenty: celebrity doctors issuing homilies on Covid-appropriate behaviour even as hospitals were dealing with triaging life support for patients in the face of an acute shortage of beds and oxygen. In March 2020, the health minister, himself a doctor, was assuring the nation that the virus had been contained and simple precautions" were all that was needed to keep the deadly virus at bay. Not surprisingly charlatans among us were on overdrive pushing herbal concoctions that had no scientific basis.
During those months we realized we could live clean. We started exercising, eating healthy, cutting back on useless, high-consumption activities like OTT weddings, parties, travel and shopping. Instead of single occupancy cars cruising on roads, we had work-from-home. But less than three years later, we have been sucked back in by jubilant saturnalia. Its party time again and to hell with the environment.
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Pandemic-era social networking was about helping, with a reel life villain like Sonu Sood becoming a real life Hercules by setting up an efficient organization to supply food, medicines and train tickets to the poor and the homeless. Individual and anonymous micro philanthropy from the most unlikely of people sprouted spontaneously and without waiting for any recognition or praise.
But we are back to a dog-eat-dog world. Social media is rife with lynch mobs targeting newer victims each day. Hospitals are back to charging huge sums. Forgotten is that resolve to beef up our creaking and grossly insufficient healthcare system.
There is a good reason the Germans built monuments to the Nazi horrors when they had stood back and watched millions of Jews murdered. They remember the Nazi past so that it may never happen again. Sure, we must forget our nightmares in order to live life and move past our own helplessness in order to avoid stasis. But constant reminders are another kind of civilizational moving on.
Survival, wrote Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi death camp survivor who dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust, is a privilege which entails obligations. Our obligation is to keep the memory of the millions of men, women and children who lost their lives to Covid, alive. It is also to ensure that the sufferings of millions of others who survived but suffered, are not forgotten or trivialized.
Sundeep Khanna is a senior journalist and the author of 'Cryptostorm: How India became ground zero of a financial revolution'. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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Juliet Morrison, assistant professor in the microbiology and plant pathology department at the University of California, Riverside, said she was excited to hear the news that the Yamagata virus was no longer a threat to public health.
This is a win for all humans because we now have one less influenza virus to fight off, she said.
That the strain disappeared during an extended period of health restrictions also provides strong evidence that public safety measures like masking and isolation work well to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses, Prof Morrison added.
However, its disappearance creates a headache for vaccine manufacturers.
The current generation of flu jabs are quadrivalent they target all four influenza viruses and are updated every six months depending on what sub-strains are in circulation.
Vaccine-makers proffer recommendations for the northern and southern hemispheres each spring and autumn, based on the influenza trends recorded during their respective winters.
But with B/Yamagata now eliminated, there is no longer a need for quadrivalent vaccines. Manufacturers must instead develop trivalent versions to target the three remaining influenza viruses.
Yet altering vaccines is not so simple as a tick of the box, said Prof Subbarao, who sits on the WHO expert panel responsible for recommending biannual changes to the flu jab.
In order to roll out trivalent vaccines for both hemispheres, the immediate challenge for manufacturers is to establish licences, she added, as the new jabs will need fresh regulatory approval.
As of now, with the autumn rollout still a long way off in the northern hemisphere, we have a window of opportunity to reduce the quadrivalent vaccine to a trivalent iteration, said Prof Subbarao.
[But] the big challenge with influenza viruses is that we make decisions six months ahead of what goes into the vaccine, and the virus continues to evolve, she said. By the time notable patterns have been observed, recommendations made and vaccines have been changed accordingly, things might have shifted again.
We dont ever seem to get it quite right, she conceded.
There is also the risk that the B/Yamagata one day makes a resurgence. History shows its a possibility.
During the Nineties, the Victoria B strain of influenza appeared only periodically during testing, but became prevalent again in Asia-Pacific at various points over the following decade.
Following the WHO ruling that B/Yamagata is no longer warranted, the US last week announced that it would update its vaccine in time for its winter rollout, which usually occurs in the autumn months ahead of the sudden drop in temperatures.
There were concerns that the shift from quadrivalent to trivalent could not be made in time though this has moved faster than expected, perhaps due to American manufacturers already having trivalent vaccine approvals.
Other countries may struggle to be as nimble.
There will also be a knock-on effect for vaccines in development, too. Moderna and Pfizer have quadrivalent mRNA vaccines in phase 3 clinical trials that contain B/Yamagata, while a Novavax jab thats currently being trialled also targets the strain.
We have to improve our influenza vaccines, absolutely no doubt about it, said Prof Subbarao.
If the mRNA vaccines currently being developed do work for flu, we will be able to push back the vaccine strain selection decision a little later, said Prof Subbarao, as they are able to be tweaked later on in the development process.
We are always wishing for four more weeks, so that might help, added Prof Subbarao.
Still, the goal that everybody has in mind is having a universal influenza vaccine, where you dont have to change it every year: something that elicits broadly cross-reactive immunity.
Were not there yet, she added. Theres a lot of exciting science, but were not there yet.
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More than 100 children have died of the flu this season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday.
The number of pediatric deaths 103 so far is not a seasonal record. While kids with underlying health problems are more at risk for severe outcomes from the flu, the latest CDC numbers provide a stark reminder that flu can indeed be devastating to any child.
This is certainly sobering information, but its not something necessarily unexpected, said Alicia Budd, head of the CDCs domestic influenza surveillance team.
More than half of the children who died (53%) had no medical issues before their influenza infection, Budd said.
Among the 10 new pediatric deaths in the most recent report, most died within the last few weeks, Budd said.
Although cases seem to be peaking across the country, flu season is not over. The CDC estimates that the nation has logged at least 28 million flu illnesses, resulting in 310,000 hospitalizations so far this year. In addition to the 103 pediatric deaths, about 20,000 others have died of flu.
There is a popular misconception among families that flu is just another cold virus, and that its no big deal, said Dr. Kristina Bryant, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Norton Healthcare in Louisville, Kentucky.
I have taken care of kids who are critically ill in the intensive care unit with flu, Bryant said. Ive taken care of kids who have ultimately died from flu. And almost universally, their parents tell me, I had no idea that flu could do this to my child.
The vast majority of children infected with flu every year recover. One of the virus biggest mysteries is how it can quickly and swiftly kill otherwise healthy and robust children without warning.
Kids have smaller airways, so breathing becomes compromised once a virus infects and inflames those airways, said Dr. Alexandra Yonts, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at Childrens National Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Childrens immune systems are superprimed to attack any new germ that comes their way, said Yonts. Sometimes those immune responses go too far.
As with a lot of viral illnesses, more than anything its the bodys immune response that determines the severity of the symptoms.
Theres something about influenza that is particularly immunogenic to our bodies and can create these massive cytokine storms and fevers that end up landing kids in the ICU with a sepsis-like picture, Yonts said.
The CDCs Budd said that nearly 90% of the children who died of flu this year were not fully vaccinated. For most kids, this means just one shot per year. But kids younger than age 8 need two doses if theyve never received the flu shot before.
Just over 50% of kids got the flu shot this season, slightly lower than 53.3% last year. Preliminary CDC data shows the vaccine is up to 61% effective in keeping kids with flu out of the hospital.
The vaccine can reduce the risk of a child needing to have a medical visit by about two-thirds, Budd said. And it can reduce their risk of hospitalization by about half.
Experts cant predict which flu virus strains might be more virulent in any given year. About half of the pediatric deaths in the 2023-24 season were due to an influenza A strain, the CDC reported, while 47 were attributed to an influenza B strain. One child had both A and B strains.
The 2014-15 flu season was a particularly severe one that took the lives of 141 children. Gianna Wehrkamp, a perfectly healthy and energetic 2-year-old, was one of them.
It was Jan. 8, 2015, when Gianna came home from day care with a slight fever not even 100 degrees. Her mother, Angie Wehrkamp, said Gianna was playing normally and did not act like anything was wrong. She was just as bossy as always, she said.
The next morning, the normally smiley, spunky little girl was not herself.
She just looked like she didnt feel good, Wehrkamp, 46, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said. You could see it on her face.
A trip to the doctor revealed that Gianna had influenza A. The doctor assured Wehrkamp that Gianna would soon be on the mend.
Gianna spent the day resting at home with her beloved teddy bear named Dog and watched cartoons; Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Frozen were favorites. Gianna perked up a bit at dinner, eating black olives one by one off of the tips of her fingers. Her fever never rose above 101 degrees.
At bedtime, Wehrkamp said that Giannas lungs sounded a little rattly, so she brought the little girl into her bed to keep an eye on her overnight.
Around 2 a.m., I woke up and she was not breathing, Wehrkamp said. It took paramedics nearly an hour to get Giannas heart beating again.
By then, it was too late.
Less than 48 hours after she started showing symptoms, Gianna died of influenza.
It all just happened so fast, Wehrkamp said. We did not know that healthy children could lose their lives to the flu.
The little girl hadnt received the flu shot the year she died.
We had every intention of getting Gianna vaccinated, her mother said. But it just kind of fell off the radar as busy parents, and unfortunately we paid the ultimate price for that. Failing to make that a priority will forever be my greatest regret.
Erika Edwards is a health and medical news writer and reporter for NBC News and "TODAY."
In todays Health Alert, influenza continues to circulate at high levels in Michigan.Given that it's late in the flu season, some may be wondering whether it's still worthwhile to get the flu shot.
I get asked that all the time by my patients, and here's my answer. If there's any flu activity happening, it's definitely not too late to get the flu shot. Here in Michigan, we have not yet plateaued. Cases are still climbing and the CDCs flu activity map shows our state as Very High for influenza. Looking at Michigans weekly influenza report, just over 8,800 outpatient visits in the week ending March 2 were due to influenza-like illness. Most of the flu results reported were H1N1, a type of influenza A virus.
While you may think its a bit late in the flu season to get the shot, there can be significant flu activity well into the month of May. The annual flu shot is your best defense against this virus. Estimates for this season show 41% to 44% effectiveness against hospitalization for adults and 52% to 61% for children.
According to the CDC, roughly 44.9% of adults and 50% of children were vaccinated for the flu this season. Here in Michigan, about 25% of adults and 19% of kids got the vaccine. Thats pretty low. The reluctance to get vaccinated could be due to COVID-19 vaccine fatigue. But also, many people think, Im healthy, so I dont need a flu vaccine. Because the flu has been around so long, people just accept it as part of life. But unfortunately, the flu can cause serious illness and death, even in healthy people.
The CDC estimates weve had 310,000 hospitalizations and about 20,000 people have died. 103 were pediatric deaths, including one here in Michigan. Sadly, almost 90% of the children who died were not fully vaccinated. Its recommended that everyone six months and older get a yearly flu shot. Kids under the age of 8 get two doses if theyve not had the shot before. I get one every year and so do my kids. And thats because the flu vaccine can lessen the severity of your illness and its very effective at preventing severe illness.
So once again, I highly recommend getting vaccinated against the flu if you have not yet done so.
The origins of COVID-19 are the subject of ongoing scientific inquiry and a key aspect of global scientific efforts. Current research supports the hypothesis of a natural origin, including sampling, epidemiology, viral evolution, and genomic epidemiology. This conclusion is based on the observed interaction patterns between animals and humans and the known mutation and evolution behavior of COVID-19.
Saskia Popescu, PhD, MPH, MA, FAPIC, is an epidemiologist and Fellow of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (FAPIC), specializing in infection prevention and public health.
"The conversation on COVID origins is very complex, says Popescu. I like to recognize that we are never going to get that level of evidence that people want. But overwhelmingly we do see from an epidemiological perspective, from genomic sampling and surveillance, and just from our knowledge of coronaviruses, and zoonotic diseases, that that's likely the origin of this."
Emphasis on epidemiological perspectives, genomic sampling, and understanding of zoonotic diseases supports considering natural zoonotic spillover as a source of the outbreak. Acknowledging challenges in pinpointing the exact moment or mechanism of transmission from animals to humans suggests accepting current evidence limits and steering the conversation towards implications for zoonotic disease prevention, lab safety, and future pandemic preparedness.
"From an outbreak perspective, we need to know the source so we can prevent it in the future, says Popescu. If you look at the likelihood that it is a zoonotic spillover event, then we can focus on addressing that from a One Health perspective, we can look at increasing biosurveillance, we can look at the risks from deforestation and climate change that are increasing, you know, animal habitats changing and our interactions with animals."
It suggests that focusing on the virus's likely zoonotic nature guides preventive measures and promotes a view of pandemic preparedness. It sees the discussion as a chance to improve global health security through better collaboration and information exchange.
Long COVID serves as an example of how infectious diseases extend beyond the initial infection, affecting individuals' health and well-being long after recovery from the acute phase, Popescu states These illnesses cause chronic issues that require us to pay attention to them to prevent these outbreaks but also to study the chronic conditions and the long-related issues as a result of those acute infections.
Framing the origins of COVID-19 within the broader context of chronic disease and long-term health impacts encourages a reevaluation of societal preparations, responses, and recoveries from infectious disease outbreaks. Investing in healthcare systems, research, and policies supporting ongoing population health needs, highlighting the interconnectedness of immediate outbreak response and long-term public health strategies.
Overall, Popescu emphasizes understanding COVID-19's origins emphasizes the need for global public health readiness and collaboration. Strengthening healthcare infrastructure, research, and policies for comprehensive health support is critical. This approach, focusing on prevention, surveillance, and addressing health disparities, highlights the importance of a united global effort to enhance health security and prepare for future health challenges.
From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said a task force will be set up to implement the recommendations made in a review of the states response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recommendations in the $9 million report, which was released Monday, included documenting existing pandemic plans immediately, making specific investments to reduce health disparities across the state and increasing the readiness and resiliency of the hospital system in an emergency.
During WHYYs Ask Governor Murphy program on Wednesday, the governor said the panel will likely continue working through the list until his last day in office.
Its gonna take us a while to chop through all of these recommendations, he said. The public health infrastructure is a huge lift financially and otherwise. Preparedness tabletop exercises, making sure that when you change administrations, theres x number of days dedicated between Election Day and inauguration to exercises and prepping for this.
Healthy volunteers are to be deliberately infected with diseases including Covid-19 in a bid to develop nasal spray vaccines that block the spread of coronaviruses.
The 44 million programme, led by Imperial College London, aims to develop next-generation vaccines that not only reduce disease severity, but also stop people from catching a virus in the first place.
Vaccines that can stop transmission of a virus are crucial to being able to end pandemics and epidemics swiftly, said Dr Richard Hatchett, the chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which is co-funding the five-year project.
If we find a way to [block transmission] ... with the next generation of Covid-19 vaccines, for example, we could then dramatically reduce the circulation of the Sars-Cov-2 virus and hence limit its ability to generate dangerous new variants, he added.
Experts believe that inhaling a vaccine directly into the nose and lungs, rather than via an injection into muscle tissue, could be the key to triggering mucosal immunity the type of protection that is believed to block infections.
Coronaviruses typically infect people through cells lining their nose, throat and lungs, said Chris Chiu, a professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial and principal investigator for the project called MusiCC.
Mucosal immunity generated at these surfaces is highly specialised Since they directly act in the place that viruses enter and exit the body, they could be the key to developing vaccines that can block viruses from being able to spread from one person to another.
The global project is also significant because it will be based on human challenge trials.
Prof Danny Altman, a professor of immunology at Imperial, told the Telegraph the programme is unique because of the sheer momentum of human challenge studies, at scale, coming stage centre.
These medical studies intentionally infect individuals with a particular disease, to test whether vaccines or drugs work. They also give scientists unique opportunities to track how an illness develops, including the relationship between a virus and the human immune system.
While they have been used for decades to better understand diseases such as malaria, flu, typhoid and cholera, there are tight regulations on when and how they can be deployed.
But last year, Imperial announced that the worlds first Covid-19 human challenge trial was safe in 36 young adults, laying the groundwork for their use more broadly. Now, the consortium will develop a trial that can be used concurrently in multiple sites worldwide.
MusiCC will test the potential of several nasal spray vaccines against betacoronaviruses the pathogen family that includes Sars-Cov-2, Mers and several seasonal common cold viruses. Trials will take place across several sites, each involving small groups of young, healthy volunteers.
This is highly significant considering that one of the major hurdles in the vaccine campaign against Covid was the failure in inducing mucosal immunity, Prof Linfa Wang, from the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, which is part of the consortium, told The Telegraph.
This model will also be highly important for other viruses of pandemic potential.
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The risk of cardiac and clot-related complications following COVID-19 is substantially reduced in people who receive the COVID-19 vaccination compared with unvaccinated individuals, reports an observational study published online in the journal Heart.
Led by Professor Daniel Prieto Alhambra the study found that COVID-19 vaccines proved to be highly effective in reducing the severity of acute SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19-related hospital admission and death.
And while some COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of rare but serious complications, such as blood clots and heart inflammation (myocarditis), the risk of these complications was substantially higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Nuria Mercade Besora, Research Assistant in Health Data Sciences at NDORMS and first author of the paper said, "Our findings probably reflect the fact that the vaccines are effective in reducing infection, and minimize the risk of severe COVID-19. These results could encourage COVID-19 vaccination among hesitant people who are worried about the potential risk of vaccine side effects."
The study set out to explore the association between COVID-19 vaccination and the risk of post-COVID-19 cardiac and thromboembolic complications using population data for the U.K., Spain and Estonia which included 10.17 million vaccinated people and 10.39 million unvaccinated people.
Individuals who were vaccinated received either an adenovirus-based vaccine (Oxford/AstraZeneca or Janssen) or one of the mRNA vaccines (BioNTech/Pfizer or Moderna) and recorded them according to four post-infection time windows: 030, 3190, 91180 and 181365 days after infection.
A range of potentially influential factors, such as age, sex and pre-existing conditions including chronic lung disease, diabetes, heart disease and a history of blood clots were accounted for in the analysis to minimize bias.
The results show that COVID-19 vaccination was associated with reduced risks of heart failure, venous thromboembolism (clot within the veins of a limb) and arterial thrombosis/thromboembolism (blood clot in the artery) for up to a year after SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Reduced risk of other complications, such as ventricular arrhythmia or cardiac arrest (heart attack), myocarditis and pericarditis were also seen, but only in the first 30 days after infection.
Compared with unvaccinated individuals, having a COVID-19 vaccination was associated with reduced risks of venous thromboembolism by 78%, arterial thrombosis/thromboembolism by 47% and heart failure by 55% in the first 30 days after SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, as time progressed the protective effects of vaccination waned.
As time progressed, the protective effects of vaccination waned, but remained at 47%, 28%, and 39% respectively at 91180 days after infection and 50%, 38%, and 48% respectively at 181365 days.
This is an observational study, so can't establish cause and effect, and the authors highlight some limitations including the inherent data quality concerns and risk of bias with use of real-world data, and potential under-reporting of post-COVID-19 complications.
However, state-of-the-art statistical methods were used to deal with these limitations and results were consistent across all databases, which they say highlights the robustness and replicability of the findings.
Nuria concluded that "The protective effects of vaccination are consistent with known reductions in disease severity, but we need to do more research to understand the effect/s of a booster vaccination in different populations."
More information: Nria Mercad-Besora et al, The role of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing post-COVID-19 thromboembolic and cardiovascular complications, Heart (2024). DOI: 10.1136/heartjnl-2023-323483
Journal information: Heart
