Michael Mina

Study's COVID Vaccine Benefits Limited to Early Pandemic

This tweet and accompanying paper are fairly misleading (note: paper is from July ‘24) There are many issues w the study itself that it’s a bit tough to go into here. But most importantly, the paper concludes: “Our findings support the wide uptake of future COVID-19 vaccination programs” No, It simply doesn’t. It says nothing of current, no less “future” programs. Let’s not try to lie w statistics. It’s bad for all of us immunologists and epidemiologists. The paper focuses on 2020-22. When the immune landscape against COVID was very naive across humans. The paper found overall important but fairly modest results of some vaccine benefits to reduce some but not all forms of cardiovascular events. (Ie Some went up, like myocarditis) Most important - a (modest) benefit:risk assessment in 2020-22 to prevent COVID-19 related cardiovascular cannot be assumed to persist to FUTURE state. It may not exist in CURRENT state - this paper doesn’t evaluate it. These authors could have evaluated 2023 and perhaps some of 2024 data as well to at least get to current state near time of publication (July 24). And would be interesting to see a re evaluation today. The immune landscape surrounding COVID-19 is markedly different today than in 2020 and will be more so in the future. This is very simple immuno-epidemiology and I am astonished that this paper passed peer review with these sweeping and unsubstantiated assertions specifically around *FUTURE* state based on 2020/2 data. Particularly the conclusion in the abstract is off putting and unsubstantiated in the findings. They say: “These findings support the wide uptake of future COVID-19 vaccination programs.” (Actually I’m not that astonished. Peer review is largely broken and there are major non scientific forces pushing on all angles surrounding Covid) To be clear, I’m not attempting to suggest there were more or that there were less issues around the vaccines than were reported. I’m troubled by the continued assumptions that data (epidemiological or immunological) from 2020 maps to future state when profound (anticipated) changes in immune landscapes have occurred. Immunologically, It’s akin immunologically to measuring something in a newborn (population) and then assuming it’ll be the same or more when that baby is an adult.