Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Dec 31;18(1):2027160.
doi: 10.1080/21645515.2022.2027160. Epub 2022 Feb 3.

The efficacy and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines in reducing infection, severity, hospitalization, and mortality: a systematic review

Ibrahim Mohammed  1 , Areej Nauman  1 , Pradipta Paul  1 , Sanjith Ganesan  1 , Kuan-Han Chen  1 , Syed Muhammad Saad Jalil  1 , Shahd H Jaouni  1 , Hussam Kawas  1 , Wafa A Khan  1 , Ahamed Lazim Vattoth  1 , Yasmeen Alavi Al-Hashimi  1 , Ahmed Fares  1 , Rached Zeghlache  1 , Dalia Zakaria  1
Affiliations

The efficacy and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines in reducing infection, severity, hospitalization, and mortality: a systematic review

Ibrahim Mohammed et al. Hum Vaccin Immunother. .

Abstract

With the relatively rapid development of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine development has become crucial for limiting disease transmission. The accelerated growth in the approved COVID-19 vaccines has sparked concerns about their efficacies which have been assessed by many studies. This systematic review compares the efficacy and effectiveness of seven COVID-19 vaccines. A comprehensive systematic literature search was performed using several databases to identify studies reporting the effectiveness or the efficacy of the vaccines. Only 42 studies met our inclusion criteria, which revealed that the COVID-19 vaccines have successfully reduced the rates of infections, severity, hospitalization, and mortality among the different populations. The full-dose regimen of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is the most effective against infections with the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants. Despite of the high effectiveness of some of the COVID-19 vaccines, more efforts are required to test their effectiveness against the other newly emerging variants.

Keywords: COVID-19; effectiveness; efficacy; vaccine.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
A diagrammatic illustration summarizing the structure of the review.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Screening and study selection protocol.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. COVID-19 Map [Internet] . Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center [cited 2021 Jun 2]. Available from: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.
    1. Zhu N, Zhang D, Wang W, Li X, Yang B, Song J, Zhao X, Huang B, Shi W, Lu R, et al. A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China, 2019. N Engl J Med. 2020;382:727–20. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2001017. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Sanders JM, Monogue ML, Jodlowski TZ, Cutrell JB.. Pharmacologic treatments for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): a review. JAMA [Internet]. 2020. [cited 2021 Sep 7]. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764727. - PubMed
    1. García-Montero C, Fraile-Martínez O, Bravo C, Torres-Carranza D, Sanchez-Trujillo L, Gómez-Lahoz AM, Guijarro LG, García-Honduvilla N, Asúnsolo A, Bujan J, et al. An updated review of sars-cov-2 vaccines and the importance of effective vaccination programs in pandemic times. Vaccines. 2021;9:433.5. doi:10.3390/vaccines9050433. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. McGill COVID-19 vaccine tracker [Internet]. [cited 2021 June 5]. https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/.

Publication types

Substances

Supplementary concepts