A study was published in May 2024 by the Bennet Institute for Applied Data Science, a multidisciplinary team based at the University of Oxford. It was an observational study to assess the safety and effectiveness of the first and second doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s (BNT162b2) covid injection in children and adolescents in England. The injection was offered to this age group from September 2021 as part of the Government’s national covid injection campaign.
The study used the OpenSAFELY-TPP database and included adolescents aged 12-15 years and children aged 5-11 years, comparing unvaccinated and single-vaccinated children with those receiving a second dose.
It compared data for at least 1,678,668 children and adolescents comprising:
- 820,926 unvaccinated adolescents.
- 441,858 adolescents who had received a first dose.
- 283,422 unvaccinated children.
- 132,462 children who had received a first dose
- There is no indication of how many adolescents and children who had received a second dose were included in the study.
The study used the incidence rate ratio (“IRR”), separately for children and adolescents, to compare unvaccinated outcomes to vaccinated outcomes and the first does (single-vaccinated) to those who had two doses of Pfizer’s “vaccine.”
IRR measures the relative difference in incidence rates between two groups. An IRR greater than 1 indicates a higher incidence rate in one group compared to the other group. An IRR less than 1 indicates a lower incidence rate in one group compared to the other group. An IRR of 1 indicates no significant difference in incidence rates between the two groups.
Hellbound and Down 