The importance of time post-vaccination in determining the decrease in vaccine efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern

  1. Yinon Bar On
  2. Elad Noor
  3. Noam Gottlieb
  4. Alex Sigal
  5. Ron Milo

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Abstract

With the development of high-efficacy vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, an urgent open question is whether currently available vaccines protect with similar efficacy against infection with SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC). Recent reports quantifying the extent by which VOC can evade vaccine immunity resulted in a range of estimates for the same VOC, which makes them difficult to interpret. One possible explanation for the discrepancies between different studies is an inconsistency in terms of the time post-vaccination of the sampled population. Here we present a model based on the observed correlation between antibody neutralization levels and vaccine efficacy, which demonstrates the impact of time post-vaccination on the comparison of the vaccine efficacy for VOC versus non-VOC infections. Our model predicts and exemplifies several possible consequences for vaccine efficacy in VOC infections: 1) a delay in the onset of vaccine efficacy against VOC; 2) a transient increase in susceptibility to breakthrough infection with VOC compared to non-VOC as a function of time after vaccination. We review preliminary data indicating that such phenomena are observed in studies of the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants. We find that ignoring the strong dependence on the time post-vaccination can lead to contradictory reports of relative efficacy against VOC versus non-VOC, with implications on mitigation strategies against VOC and the design of vaccine efficacy studies.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.06.21258429: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.06.06.21258429v1 on medRxiv