Covid vaccines protect people of all body weights from hospitalisation and death, according to a new study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, covering nine million adults in England, a finding of particular relevance to people with obesity, who are at risk of developing severe disease when infected with the virus.
Within the vaccinated group, however, those with a low or high body mass index (BMI) were at greater risk of hospitalisation and death compared with people with healthy weight.
“Previous work has shown that people with obesity are less likely to take seasonal flu vaccines and have modestly reduced benefits from flu vaccinations, although the reasons for this are not well understood,” they said.
Lead author Dr Carmen Piernas, Nuffield department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, UK, said, “Our findings provide further evidence that Covid-19 vaccines save lives for people of all sizes.”
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Of over 9 million people in the study, 566,461 tested positive during the study from December 8, 2020 (date of the first vaccine given in the UK) to November 17, 2021. Of those, 32,808 were hospitalised and 14,389 died.
{{/usCountry}}Of over 9 million people in the study, 566,461 tested positive during the study from December 8, 2020 (date of the first vaccine given in the UK) to November 17, 2021. Of those, 32,808 were hospitalised and 14,389 died.
{{/usCountry}}At the end of the study period, 23.3% of the healthy weight group (817,741 of 3,509,231 people), 32.6% of the underweight group (104,488 of 320,737 people), 16.8% of the overweight group (513,570 of 3,062,925 people) and 14.2% of the group with obesity (322,890 of 2,278,649 people) had no doses of any Covid-19 vaccine.
“What they are essentially saying is that BMI may impact the severity of disease but not the immune response elicited due to vaccines, which makes sense. Severe Covid being caused in obese and vaccine effectiveness in obese are two different things,” said Dr Anoop Misra, executive chairman, Fortis C-DOC Hospital for Diabetes and Allied Sciences.