The Vaccine Booster Breakthroughs Project
The Vaccine Booster Breakthroughs project builds upon the innovative work of the Vaccine Breakthroughs Project, which helped inform the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s strategy for the UK’s Autumn 2022 COVID-19 vaccine booster rollout.
The Vaccine Breakthrough (VBB) Project investigated serious COVID-19 breakthrough events (i.e. hospitalisation and death) that happened after a person received their primary and third or booster dose vaccinations. Now, the VBB team are investigating breakthrough events that happen after a person receives their second booster dose vaccine.
Visit the VBB research site at: Vaccine Booster Breakthroughs | The University of Edinburgh
Who is involved?
VBB is led by researchers from the Usher Institute, The University of Edinburgh and includes contributors from across all four UK nations. The VBB team also has an actively involved Patient and Public Involvement group.
Hear from a PPI member about why this research is important
What are they doing?
The project team are looking at:
- How often serious post-autumn booster breakthroughs occur across each of the four UK nations and UK overall;
- What factors put a person at greater risk of experiencing a serious breakthrough event (e.g. their health history, demographic characteristics and ethnicity);
- How these risks may differ depending on the number of doses a person receives, the type of vaccine they are given, and what variant dominates at the time of infection;
- Whether we can predict which groups of people who are likely to experience a post-vaccine breakthrough.
How will they do this?
VBB will first conduct individual analyses separately in each of the four nations and then pool results for a UK-wide analysis. To do this, they will access data from:
- the RCGP’s ORCHID national surveillance dataset (England);
- the Honest Broker Service (Northern Ireland);
- the EAVE II project (Scotland);
- and SAIL Databank (Wales)