Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Against Death Using a Novel Measure: COVID Excess Mortality Percentage

COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives; however, understanding the long-term effectiveness of these vaccines is imperative to developing recommendations for booster doses and other precautions. Comparisons of mortality rates between more and less vaccinated groups may be misleading due to selection bias, as these groups may differ in underlying health status. We studied all adult deaths during the period of 1 April 2021–30 June 2022 in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, linked to vaccination records, and we used mortality from other natural causes to proxy for underlying health. We report relative COVID-19 mortality risk (RMR) for those vaccinated with two and three doses versus the unvaccinated, using a novel outcome measure that controls for selection effects. This measure, COVID Excess Mortality Percentage (CEMP), uses the non-COVID natural mortality rate (Non-COVID-NMR) as a measure of population risk of COVID mortality without vaccination. We validate this measure during the pre-vaccine period (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.97) and demonstrate that selection effects are large, with non-COVID-NMRs for two-dose vaccinees often less than half those for the unvaccinated, and non-COVID NMRs often still lower for three-dose (booster) recipients. Progressive waning of two-dose effectiveness is observed, with an RMR of 10.6% for two-dose vaccinees aged 60+ versus the unvaccinated during April–June 2021, rising steadily to 36.2% during the Omicron period (January–June, 2022). A booster dose reduced RMR to 9.5% and 10.8% for ages 60+ during the two periods when boosters were available (October–December, 2021; January–June, 2022). Boosters thus provide important additional protection against mortality.

The online appendix for this paper is at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=4250492.

Note:
Funding Information: Research support came from NIH, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Award UL1TR001436.

Conflict of Interests: The authors have no competing interests.

Ethical Approval: The project was approved by the Medical College of Wisconsin Human Research Review Board.

Keywords: COVID-19; COVID-19 mortality; cause of death; COVID Excess Mortality Percentage; vaccine effectiveness; vaccine efficacy; selection bias

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Atanasov, Vladimir A. and Barreto Parra, Paula Natalia and Franchi, Lorenzo and Whittle, Jeffrey and Meurer, John and Weston, Benjamin and Luo, Qian and Yuan, Andy and Zhang, Ruohao and Black, Bernard S., Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Against Death Using a Novel Measure: COVID Excess Mortality Percentage. Vaccines 2023, 11(2), 379, Northwestern Law & Econ Research Paper No. 22-18, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4250460 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4250460