NEW YORK (AP) — A study on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness has finally been published after being blocked from a government health journal.The vaccine was found to be about 55% effective against COVID-19-associated hospitalizations, and reduced COVID-19-related trips to emergency departments and urgent care clinics by 50%, according to the study published Tuesday by JAMA Network Open.The findings are not particularly surprising: Researchers have repeatedly found that COVID-19 vaccines work. But the paper drew public attention after Trump administration political appointees decided not to run it in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication.They argued that the study’s design was too vulnerable to false assumptions that could produce flawed results. But many public health researchers maintain it’s a reliable design that’s been used for decades and offers the best way to understand how well a vaccine is working currently.
“It is critical that we continue to characterize and publish estimates of vaccine effectiveness in populations with changing immunity against evolving viral strains,” wrote Natalie Dean, an Emory University biostatistics expert, in a commentary that accompanied the study’s publication Tuesday.
