The Sars-Cov-2 virus, which was first confirmed in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, quickly spread across the globe. In March 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, in an effort to control it and prevent infection with the Sars-Cov-2 virus, the development of vaccines that would prevent the disease caused by the virus, had to begin quickly. After development, clinical trials were started and were sped up due to the need to vaccinate the population. Clinical study phases I-III were carried out, each involving larger number of people. In these studies, immunogenicity, efficacy and safety of the vaccines were evaluated.
The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to determine the immunogenicity, efficacy and safety of the vaccines approved in the Republic of Slovenia and to document the characteristics of the studies that assessed the immunogenicity, efficacy and safety of all then available vaccines for the prevention of Covid-19. The bibliographic bases Pubmed and Clinicaltrials yielded 4740 articles based on a predetermined search profile, which we then narrowed down to 110 articles. After reading the abstracts, then complete articles and applying the exclusion criteria, we excluded 69 articles. In systematic review we included a total of 41 articles, in which authors described 53 studies.
We summarised the characteristics of all included studies (53). We documented the methods and results of the immunogenicity, efficacy and safety, found in the studies of the vaccines, which had been approved for use in the Republic of Slovenia by July 2021 (18 studies). All studies were performed on the original strain of the Sars-Cov-2 virus.
Of all the studies, included in the systematic review, immunogenicity was evaluated in 32 studies, efficacy in 14 and safety in 36 studies. We concluded that the results of the immunogenicity assessments are incomparable among the studies, which can be attributed to the use of different methods of analyses. We have discovered that different mRNA vaccines are similar to each other in efficacy and safety, the same applies to viral vector vaccines. The Comirnaty vaccine had a 95% efficacy (one study), the Spikevax vaccine a 94.1% (one study), the Vaxzevria vaccine a 55.0 to 75.4% efficacy (four studies), and the Janssen vaccine a 67.2% (one study). The most common side effects of vaccination were pain around the area where the shot was administered, headache and exhaustion. Other local and systemic reactions were also reported but less frequently than previously mentioned.
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