Study: All COVID-Infected at Health Conference Were Vaccinated; Study: People ‘Up to Date’ With COVID-19 Vaccines More Likely to Be Infected, and other C-Virus related stories

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Study: All COVID-Infected at Health Conference Were Vaccinated

Every person known to be infected with COVID-19 after attending a 2022 health conference in Germany was vaccinated, according to a new study.

All people who reported testing positive for COVID-19 said they had received at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

While about 4,462 people attended the conference in Berlin in the fall of 2022, just 1,355 filled out a survey and only about half of those were tested after the conference, researchers said in the new paper, published on June 13 by JAMA Network Open, a journal from the American Medical Association.

Of the people who filled out the survey and were tested after the conference, 109, or 14 percent, tested positive for COVID-19.

All 109 were vaccinated.

Just 19 had evidence of prior COVID-19 infection.

In comparison, of the people who filled out the survey and tested negative after the conference, 98 percent were vaccinated and 62.5 percent had proven prior COVID-19. --->READ MORE HERE

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People ‘Up to Date’ With COVID-19 Vaccines More Likely to Be Infected: Study

People who are “up to date” with their COVID-19 vaccinations are more likely to get infected, according to a new study.

Vaccinated people who received one of the updated bivalent vaccines had a higher risk of becoming infected when compared to people who hadn’t—a group that included both vaccinated and unvaccinated people—researchers with the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio found.

The higher risk held even after adjusting for factors such as age and job location.

“This study highlights the challenges of counting on protection from a vaccine when the effectiveness of the vaccine decreases over time as new variants emerge that are antigenically very different from those used to develop the vaccine,” Dr. Nabin Shrestha and other researchers said.

The Omicron XBB subvariant became dominant in the United States in January. The bivalent vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer target BA.4 and BA.5, as well as the old Wuhan strain.

The study, published on the medRxiv server (pdf) on June 12 ahead of peer review, included 48,344 employees of the Cleveland Clinic, 47 percent of whom had evidence of prior infection. Employees were included if they were employed in the fall of 2022, when the bivalent vaccines first became available, and were still employed when the XBB strain and its lineages became dominant. The study covered Jan. 29 to May 10. People whose age and sex weren’t available were excluded.

Analyzing the vaccine effectiveness with a Simon–Makuch hazard plot, the researchers treated each employee as “not up to date.” When a worker received a bivalent dose, they started counting as “up to date.” Employees stopped being counted if they were fired. --->READ MORE HERE

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