About us
Find out more about our research: what we are doing, who we are working with, and why it is important.
The Vaccine Booster Breakthroughs Project (VBB) will build upon the innovative and successful work of the original Vaccine Breakthroughs Project. The original project investigated serious COVID-19 breakthrough events that happened after a person received their primary and third or booster dose vaccinations.
Now, the VBB project will look into breakthrough events that happen after a person receives their second booster dose vaccination.
Our researchers are looking at:
- how often these 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 well their immune system works, whether they live in poverty);
- 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.
Vaccine breakthrough is a term used to describe the SARS-CoV-2 virus ‘breaking through’ the protection given by COVID-19 vaccines. This includes first-time infections and reinfections with COVID-19, as well as hospital admissions and deaths.
Both the original Vaccine Breakthroughs Project and the current VBB project focus on the last two types of breakthrough event as they are both of serious concern. This is why they are often referred to as "serious breakthrough events".
The previous Vaccine Breakthroughs Project provided crucial results which identified which groups of people are more at risk of experiencing these serious outcomes.
Read more about our previous work
Prior to publication these results were relayed to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to help inform the strategy for the Autumn 2022 booster vaccine roll-out.
Find our more about how our findings have been used
This current work will help to work out the groups of people who are most at risk of experiencing a serious breakthrough event after their Autumn / second booster dose vaccination.
We hope that this current research will again help UK policy makers and health services know who is most likely to benefit from further rounds of vaccination, new treatments (e.g. monoclonal antibodies), or other interventions (e.g. shielding).
You can hear more from Debs Smith, a PPI representative for both the Vaccine Breakthroughs and VBB project, say talk about why this type of COVID-19 research remains important and relevant for so many people across the UK by watching the video below.
- Video: Vaccine Breakthrough Project - A PPI perspective
- Thoughts from Patient and Public Involvement group member Deb Smith on the importance and relevance of the work done by the Vaccine Breakthrough Project.
Find out more about how the Vaccine Breakthroughs Project's findings were used in the real world
We will carry out a descriptive analysis to build a picture of which people experience serious post-autumn booster breakthrough events. We will consider these results in terms of people’s immune response after vaccination, using data from blood tests (‘serology’) where available. We will also analyse how long this protection lasts.
Following this, we will calculate the risk of experiencing vaccine breakthrough for particular groups, and create a risk prediction model. Finally, we will consider vaccine breakthroughs in terms of viral variant, vaccine type, and number of doses.
For this project we will safely access data through:
- the Royal College of General Practitioners' ORCHID national surveillance dataset (England);
- the Honest Broker Service (Northern Ireland);
- the EAVE II project (Scotland);
- and the SAIL Databank (Wales)
We will conduct individual analyses separately in each of the four nations and then pool results for a UK-wide analysis.
This project builds on research and infrastructure from the completed Vaccine Breakthroughs Project, as well as the Data and Connectivity: COVID-19 Vaccine Pharmacovigilance (DaC-VaP) and DaC-VaP-2 projects - part of the National Core Studies Programme on Data and Connectivity.
Hear more about the data accessed by the RCGP
Hear more about the data accessed through the Honest Broker Service
Hear more about the data accessed through the EAVE II Project