Abstract:

Approximately 800 million COVID-19 cases and 7 million COVID-19 deaths have been reported to the World Health Organization thus far.  Vaccination is a major tool to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, but its effectiveness wanes over time and tends to be lower against new SARS-CoV-2 variants. The knowledge about the waning effects of vaccination can guide boosting strategies. In a series of papers published in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and The Lancet, we reported several large cohort studies using COVID-19 vaccination and case surveillance data from the states of North Carolina and Nebraska, as well as electronic health records from the Cleveland Clinic Health System. We developed a novel statistical framework to evaluate the time-varying effects of the three generations of COVID-19 vaccines produced in the United States on infections with different SARS-CoV-2 variants and on severe outcomes (hospitalization and death). Our findings have been used by the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration and reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC News.

Speaker:

Danyu Lin, Ph.D., is the Dennis Gillings Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Lin has published 300 papers, with 45,000 citations and an h-index of 97. The statistical methods he developed have been used in thousands of scientific studies. His publications on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments (5 in New England Journal of Medicine, 3 in JAMA, and 2 in Lancet —all as first and corresponding author) have been viewed 1 million times, cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and the World Health Organization, and reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News. Dr. Lin is an elected fellow of American Statistical Association and Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a recipient of Mortimer Spiegelman Award from American Public Health Association, and a recipient of George W. Snedecor Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.