UK to study how well COVID-19 vaccine cuts transmission rates among college students
The University of Kentucky is embarking on a new clinical trial to study how effective COVID-19 vaccines are at reducing the rates of transmission among young adults.
“The study really aims to answer that question: if you get a vaccine . . . is there still a chance you might be asymptomatically infected, [and] is there still a chance you might pass that infection along to someone around you who is not immunized?” Dr. Christopher Simmons, one of the study’s co-investigators, said Monday.
“The question isn’t necessarily to keep safe the individuals who are being vaccinated. The question is, are we also keeping safe the unvaccinated individuals around them?”
Anyone in Kentucky between the ages of 18 and 26 who is enrolled in a post-secondary institution, including a college or university, trade and technical schools, is eligible to sign up for the PreventCovidU study, which will last up to seven months and monitor close to 150 people.
Researchers are targeting this demographic in part because of their social habits. Young college students are likelier to be in “close contact” with many people outside their household, and are therefore more likely to catch the virus or spread it, said Dr. George Edgar Hoover, project manager for the trial. Throughout the pandemic, Kentuckians between the ages 20-29 accounted for some of the highest incidence rates of infection and were a major driver in community spread across the commonwealth.
As researchers noted, someone who is vaccinated can still test positive for COVID-19, though vaccines do reduce that likelihood. But more importantly, vaccinations greatly reduce the probability for severe infection. State public health officials watched that happen in real time, when, in March, an unvaccinated employee at a Morehead nursing home brought a COVID-19 variant into work, infecting 46 people, 18 of whom were fully vaccinated. In a study of the outbreak completed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April, researchers concluded that fully vaccinated staff and residents who tested positive were 87% less likely to show any symptoms, compared with those who weren’t vaccinated.
Researchers are less certain about the degree to which vaccination blunts a person’s chances of spreading infection if they test positive. And, as strains of coronavirus continue to mutate, scientists are eager to study vaccine protections against those variants, said UK principal investigator Dr. Richard Greenberg.
“It is actually more important now than ever before, because of the mutants circulating,” he said. And sociable young people are a perfect group to study.
Over a series of months, everyone in the UK study will self-monitor and conduct coronavirus tests (nasal swab) on themselves each day, including when they leave school for summer vacation. UK will pay shipping costs for all test kits, as well as provide students a stipend for participating.
In addition to daily monitoring of any symptoms or new infection, researchers will ask students early in the trial to provide contact information for people they regularly spend time with, including close friends, family members, coworkers, teammates, classmates and roommates. That way, if a participating student tests positive, especially if they’ve been vaccinated, researchers will want to reach out to their close contacts and provide them with daily test kits to see whether they, too test positive.
If close contacts do not test positive, this will give researchers greater indication of how effective the vaccine is at preventing transmission.
“That’s the idea of the science behind it: to trace and see how, after getting the vaccine, if [the virus can still be transmitted] to people you’re in close contact with,” Dr. Hoover said.
Anyone who is already vaccinated is not eligible to sign up for this particular trial. Rather, the study is looking for people who are either willing to be vaccinated with the two-dose Moderna vaccine as part of the trial, or young adults that do not plan to get vaccinated yet but are willing to participate in the study. But researchers made it clear on Monday: they don’t want anyone to forgo vaccination in order to participate.
“We’re not asking for anyone to hold off on vaccination. We’re looking for individuals who are hesitant, sitting on the fence, maybe want to do something to help end the pandemic,” Dr. Simmons said. “This is an opportunity for them to do that.”
More information about the study can be found at stopcovidky.com.
