Assessing COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness in Observational Studies via Nested Trial Emulation

Abstract: Observational data are often used to estimate real-world effectiveness and durability of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines. A sequence of nested trials can be emulated to draw inference from such data while minimizing selection bias, immortal time bias, and confounding. Typically, when nested trial emulation (NTE) is employed, effect estimates are pooled across trials to increase statistical efficiency. However, such pooled estimates may lack a clear interpretation when the treatment effect is heterogeneous across trials. In the context of COVID-19, vaccine effectiveness quite plausibly will vary over calendar time due to newly emerging variants of the virus. This manuscript considers a NTE inverse probability weighted estimator of vaccine effectiveness that may vary over calendar time, time since vaccination, or both. Statistical testing of the trial effect homogeneity assumption is considered. Simulation studies are presented examining the finite-sample performance of these methods under a variety of scenarios. The methods are used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 outcomes using observational data on over 120,000 residents of Abruzzo, Italy during 2021.