Results, 2019/20 season

DRIVE Project publishes brand-specific IVE estimations for Season 2019/20

2019/20 influenza season was mild and highly impacted by COVID-19. Despite all the challenges, DRIVE study platform has obtained precise results for influenza vaccine effectiveness and the report with the main findings in now publicly available, as well as a lay summary for all audiences.
DRIVE network seeks constant expansion and consequently, the platform has grown from 5 study sites in 5 European countries during 2017/18, to 15 study sites in 7 countries in the current season.

Highlights:

  • First precise brand-specific estimates were obtained from TND studies in the 2019/20, adding to the precise brand-specific estimates obtained in the Finnish register-based cohort studies.
  • In 2019/20, four primary care-based test-negative design (TND) studies, eight hospital-based TND studies and one population-based cohort study (Finland) were conducted. TND studies included 3531 cases and 5546 controls. 2235 cases and 2723 controls in primary care, and 1296 cases and 2823 controls in hospital.
  • IVE estimates were available for 8/11 brands licensed in Europe in 2019.
  • Site-specific confounder-adjusted IVE estimates were centrally calculated and pooled through meta-analysis.
  • The studies were not designed to compare IVE of different brands.

In the coming seasons, DRIVE will continue generating access to larger amounts of data by: increasing the number of sites participating in test-negative studies; exploring the possibility of accessing data from a greater number of vaccination registers and other electronic healthcare databases; and encouraging greater data sharing amongst public health institutes, as well as health and medical research organisations across Europe.

Summary of the results

Read the full report

*The Development of Robust and Innovative Vaccine Effectiveness (DRIVE) project is a public-private partnership aiming to build capacity in Europe for estimating brand-specific influenza vaccine effectiveness (IVE). The DRIVE Project, which is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), was initiated as a response to the new guidance on influenza vaccines by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) that came into effect in the beginning of 2017.