ArticleNature communications2024
Bias and negative values of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness estimates from a test-negative design without controlling for prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effectiveness of a hepatitis E vaccine against medically-attended symptomatic infection in HBsAg-positive adults from a test-negative design study.Nature communications · 2025Trial
- Improving Assessment of Vaccine Effectiveness by Coupling Test-negative Design Studies with Survival Models.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Integrating Genomic Data into Test-negative Designs for Estimating Lineage-specific COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2026Article
- Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters in Children Across Pandemic and Endemic Periods.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Improving Assessment of Vaccine Effectiveness by Coupling Test-Negative Design Studies with Survival Models.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Estimated Effectiveness of 2024-2025 COVID-19 Vaccination Against Severe COVID-19.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- COVID-19 mRNA vaccines: a prospective outlook from technological innovation to clinical practice.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Review
- Retrospective neutralization analysis of SARS-CoV-2 variants in early pandemic sera.Frontiers in immunology · 2026Article
- SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Effectiveness in the Borriana COVID-19 Cohort: A Prospective Population-Based Cohort Study.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Effectiveness of 2024-2025 COVID-19 Vaccination Against COVID-19 Hospitalization and Severe In-Hospital Outcomes - IVY Network, 26 Hospitals, September 1, 2024-April 30, 2025.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Test-negative designs (TNDs) are used to assess vaccine effectiveness (VE). Protection from infection-induced immunity may confound the association between case and vaccination status, but collecting reliable infection history can be challenging. If vaccinated individuals have less infection-induced protection than unvaccinated individuals, failure to account for infection history could underestimate VE, though the bias is not well understood. We simulated individual-level SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination histories and a TND. VE against symptomatic infection and VE against severe disease estimates unadjusted for infection history underestimated VE compared to estimates adjusted for infection history, and unadjusted estimates were more likely to be below 0%, which could lead to an incorrect interpretation that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful. TNDs assessing VE immediately following vaccine rollout introduced the largest bias and potential for negative VE against symptomatic infection. Despite the potential for bias, VE estimates from TNDs without prior infection information are useful because underestimation is rarely more than 8 percentage points.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.