Observational methods for COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness research: an empirical evaluation and target trial emulation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

There are scarce data on best practices to control for confounding in observational studies assessing vaccine effectiveness to prevent COVID-19. We compared the performance of three well-established methods [overlap weighting, inverse probability treatment weighting and propensity score (PS) matching] to minimize confounding when comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Subsequently, we conducted a target trial emulation to study the ability of these methods to replicate COVID-19 vaccine trials.

Methods

We included all individuals aged ≥75 from primary care records from the UK [Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) AURUM], who were not infected with or vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 as of 4 January 2021. Vaccination status was then defined based on first

SUBMITTER: Catala M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10859138 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature