Abstract
Healthcare professionals are considered to be at high risk of exposure and spread of SARS-CoV-2, and have therefore been considered a priority group in COVID-19 vaccination campaign strategies. However, it must be assumed that the immune response is influenced by numerous factors, including sex and gender. The analysis of these factors is an impact element for stratifying the population and targeting the vaccination strategy. Therefore, a large cohort of healthcare workers participating in the Italian vaccination campaign against SARS-CoV-2 has been studied to establish the impact of sex and gender on vaccination coverage using the Gender Impact Assessment approach. This study shows a significant difference in the antibody titers among different age and sex groups, with a clear decreasing trend in antibody titers in the older age groups. Overall, the serological values were significantly higher in females; the reported side effects are more frequent in females than in males. Therefore, disaggregated data point out how the evaluation of gender factors could be essential in COVID-19 vaccination strategies. On this biomedical and social basis, suggestions are provided to improve the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination campaign in healthcare professionals. Still, they could be adapted to other categories and contexts.
Highlights
Healthcare workers are one of the most at risk groups for being exposed to SARSCoV-2 infection and transmitting it, among patients [1]
The analysis of the hospital-based healthcare workers in this study allows us to focus mainly on re-evaluating the vaccination campaign and prevention policies for designing and delivering a public health service plan efficiently tailored for healthcare professionals
Disaggregated data alone cannot provide a single answer on the best strategy to adopt for the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations
Summary
Healthcare workers are one of the most at risk groups for being exposed to SARSCoV-2 infection and transmitting it, among patients [1]. The SARS-CoV-2 infection causes different immune responses in men and women in prevalence, intensity, and outcome [4], including in the cases of natural infection and vaccination [5,6]. These differences were already known in the literature for other viral infections [7] and in general for the immune response [8,9]. Underlying these differences is a combination of nature and nurture [10,11,12]
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