Vaccine effectiveness for prevention of covid-19 related hospital admission during pregnancy in England during the alpha and delta variant dominant periods of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: population based cohort study

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To estimate vaccine effectiveness for preventing covid-19 related hospital admission in individuals first infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus during pregnancy compared with those of reproductive age who were not pregnant when first infected with the virus.

DESIGN: Population based cohort study.

SETTING: Office for National Statistics Public Health Data Asset linked dataset, providing national linked census and administrative data in England, 8 December 2020 to 31 August 2021.

PARTICIPANTS: 815 477 females aged 18-45 years (mean age 30.4 years) who had documented evidence of a first SARS-CoV-2 infection in the NHS Test and Trace or Hospital Episode Statistics data.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Hospital admission where covid-19 was recorded as the primary diagnosis. Cox proportional hazards models, adjusted for calendar time of infection, sociodemographic factors, and pre-existing health conditions related to uptake of the covid-19 vaccine and risk of severe covid-19 outcomes, were used to estimate vaccine effectiveness as the complement of the hazard ratio for hospital admission for covid-19.

RESULTS: Compared with pregnant individuals who were not vaccinated, the adjusted rate of hospital admission for covid-19 was 77% (95% confidence interval 70% to 82%) lower for pregnant individuals who had received one dose and 83% (76% to 89%) lower for those who had received two doses of vaccine. These estimates were similar to those found in the non-pregnant group: 79% (77% to 81%) for one dose and 83% (82% to 85%) for two doses of vaccine. Among those who were vaccinated >90 days before infection, having two doses of vaccine was associated with a greater reduction in risk than one dose.

CONCLUSIONS: Covid-19 vaccination was associated with reduced rates of hospital admission in pregnant individuals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the reduction in risk was similar to that in non-pregnant individuals. Waning of vaccine effectiveness occurred more quickly after one than after two doses of vaccine.

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This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjmed-2022-000403

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/34a8f7c0-c193-459f-b75b-1a9df8dcf2ca