Protection Duration of COVID-19 Vaccines: Waning Effectiveness and Future Perspective.

Chunlan Zhuang,Ningshao Xia,Shoujie Huang,Yuxin Sun,Ting Wu,Yingying Su,Qi Chen,Xiaohui Liu

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2022.828806

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have very successfully decreased the disease risk as we know; some key information remains unknown due to the short development history and the lack of long-term follow-up studies in vaccinated populations. One of the unanswered issues is the protection duration conferred after COVID-19 vaccination, which appears to play a pivotal role in the future impact of pathogens and is critical to inform the public health response and policy decisions. Here, we review current information on the long-term effectiveness of different COVID-19 vaccines, persistence of immunogenicity, and gaps in knowledge. Meanwhile, we also discuss the influencing factors and future study prospects on this topic.

Highlights

An emerging infectious respiratory disease named as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, which has spread worldwide and led to a tremendous disease burden
Waning VE was most pronounced in a one test-negative case– control study conducted in a population aged 12 and older in Qatar (Chemaitelly et al, 2021); the results showed that the VE of BNT162b2 against SARS-CoV-2 infection was less than 50% within 10–14 weeks after two doses and could not even be observed after 20 weeks—there was no difference in the incidence of infection between vaccinated and unvaccinated population
Based on the available data in North Carolina, the effectiveness of a single dose of Ad26.COV2.S ramped to a peak level that seemed to be lower than the effectiveness of the two doses of mRNA vaccines 1 month after vaccination in the pre-Delta period, but there was little loss of VE caused by the Delta variant at 6–7 months (Figure 1D)

Summary

Introduction

An emerging infectious respiratory disease named as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, which has spread worldwide and led to a tremendous disease burden. The recent studies (Andrews et al, 2021; Chemaitelly et al, 2021; Lin et al, 2021; Tartof et al, 2021) of long-term VE for BNT162b2 (Figure 1A), mRNA-1273 (Figure 1B), AZD1222 (Figure 1C), and Ad26.COV2.S (Figure 1D) suggested that these vaccines differ widely on the extents of waning VE over time in symptomatic COVID-19 cases or asymptomatic infections caused by the Delta variant.

Results

Conclusion