COVID-19 vaccines have shown to be up to 87% effective against the disease in long-term care facilities as more evidence mounts about how well the medication is protecting LTC residents, a London-based research team recently declared.
Key findings from more than 17 identified studies reporting on effects of COVID-19 vaccines in LTC have mostly estimated vaccines to be around 60% or higher in protecting against infection — with one study, based in Kentucky, showing the vaccines to be 87% effective against symptomatic illnesses, 94% effective against death and 66% effective in preventing infections overall.
“Following the widespread rollout of vaccinations in LTC facilities, there is now a growing body of evidence on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccinations in these populations,” the researchers wrote. “These studies fill a gap that was left by the large registration trials of COVID-19 vaccines, which systematically excluded older and frail people.”
Researchers stressed the importance of vaccines continuing the flow to LTC facilities in order to understand how well they protect the population from severe outcomes, especially since little to no data was available during early trials.
“While narrow inclusion criteria may have helped speed up the completion of trials, the fact that evidence on vaccine effectiveness in the population most severely hit by the pandemic only emerges now highlights the issue of continued underrepresentation of vulnerable populations in pharmaceutical trials,” they concluded.
Full findings were published Tuesday in the Journal of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.
