Real-world COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness and the Mass Vaccination Experience in Israel

When:

Thursday, May 6, 2021 - 1:00pm

Room:

This seminar will be webcast on Zoom

Lecturer(s):

Ben Reis, Director of the Predictive Medicine Group in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Ben Reis will give an overview of and update 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, The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. Dr Reis is currently in Israel continuing these epidemiological studies and will give us an update on how the pandemic is evolving post-vaccinations.

Dr. Ben Reis is Director of the Predictive Medicine Group in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School. 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.

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be online only due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Please note that this webinar is at 1pm EDT (5 pm GMT, 8pm Israeli time) to accomodate a potential international audience.