(Bloomberg) — The UK could have averted more than 7,000 Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths over a four-month period in 2022 if people had received the recommended number of vaccines. (Bloomberg) — The UK could have averted more than 7,000 Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths over a four-month period in 2022 if people had received the recommended number of vaccines. The first British study of its kind, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet, found that 44% of the population hadn’t gotten enough protective shots by June of that year.
The first vaccines were rolled out in December 2020. The research comes as the UK Health Security Agency urges people at risk to get vaccinated against Covid and seasonal flu as cases of both are on the rise, almost four years after the pandemic was first declared. While uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine was high when the shots were first rolled out, demand has waned.
The new study indicates that ensuring people who are at risk of severe disease get booster shots could still prevent thousands of deaths and hospitalizations. During the study, the researchers were updating the UK’s chief medical officers and scientists, who were “pretty surprised with the extent of under vaccination overall,” said Aziz Sheikh, director of the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh and one of the paper’s authors. The study, which marks the first time researchers have been able to use electronic health data for the entire population of the four nations of the UK, found that not having the full number of recommended Covid-19 vaccines was associated with more severe outcomes, which was defined as going to hospital or dying.
People who experienced higher levels of deprivation, those of a non-white ethnicity and those who were male had higher chances of being under vaccinated, a finding that echoes earlier research indicating that social inequality and ethnicity play a role in vaccination coverage. Vaccine Targets The scientists looked at a counter scenario in which everyone in the UK was fully vaccinated by June 2022. There would have been 7,180 fewer severe Covid outcomes over the four month period from June to the end of September 2022, they found, despite it being summer, a time when hospital admissions tend to be lower.
“Between 15% and 20% of those hospital admissions or deaths that did happen could have been averted,” said Angela Wood, associate director of the BHF Data Science Center at Health Data Research UK. The research can help identify “which groups should in future be specifically targeted to maximize uptake of vaccines for Covid and other infections,” Andrew Freedman, a consultant in infectious disease and vaccine clinical trials at Cardiff University School of Medicine, said in comments to the Science Media Centre. “This will be particularly crucial in the event of another pandemic.
” Freedman was not involved in the research. More stories like this are available on bloomberg. com ©2024 Bloomberg L.
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From: bloombergquint
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