Real-world COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness and the Mass Vaccination Experience in Israel
Speaker: Ben Reis, PhD, Director, Predictive Medicine Group, Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP), Faculty at at Harvard Medical School
Dr. Ben Reis will lead a discussion on the recent New England Journal of Medicine paper he co-authored, providing the first real-world study of effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. It was the largest study yet to quantify the impact of the vaccine outside the confines of a clinical trial. The study used innovative epidemiological methods to analyze vaccine effectiveness for preventing symptomatic diseases, severe illness and death. Dr. Reis will discuss his study and the lessons learned from the nation-wide mass vaccination experience in Israel. The study has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Fortune.
Dr. Ben Reis is Director of the Predictive Medicine Group at Harvard Medical School and the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. His research focuses on understanding the essential patterns of human disease, and on developing novel approaches for predicting disease. He has created systems that allow doctors to predict dangerous clinical conditions years in advance, as well as predictive pharmacology systems that allow public health officials to identify life-threatening adverse drug effects years in advance. Dr. Reis has designed predictive health monitoring systems for regional and national settings, and has advised governments worldwide on establishing biodefense and biosurveillance infrastructures. He has been recognized by the White House for his work on harnessing social networks to promote health, and by the US State Department, USAID and NASA for his work in global health innovation.
