Frequently Asked Questions

 

General Questions About The Study

  • Thanks to our participants, we are the largest vaccine effectiveness study for residents of long-term care, retirement home, and assisted living. This is important because the more participants we have, the more generalizable our data is. Our large sample size allows us to help all residents of long-term care, retirement homes, and assisted living - not just in Ontario, or Canada, but around the world! We will be sharing back some individualized results with participants, so participants and their families may find this information interesting. But, through their participation, participants are actually helping hundreds of thousands of people just like them!

  • We started our recruitment at the end of March 2021 with just a handful of long-term care homes. Gradually, more homes joined the study including assisted living and retirement homes. We now have 25 homes in our study, and over 1100 residents participating! At this time, we are no longer recruiting new participants.

  • We are aiming to collect a blood sample every 3 months until the end of the COVID-19 Immunity Study.

Questions You May Have About the Procedures in This Study

  • The purpose of this study is to:

    • Understand what features of the immune response protects residents from COVID-19 infection or increases infection risk

    • Determine if living in a home that has had infections will increase or decrease the risk of subsequent infections

    • Understand how well older, frail adults respond to COVID-19 vaccination

  • All data is great data. When we have samples from the same person but from different time points, we can track their immunity over time. If we miss a data point, that’s okay.

 

Questions You May Have About Contacting Us

  • If you have any questions about the research now or later, or if you think you have a research-related injury, please contact your site coordinator or study leads. Their information can be found on our “Contact Us” Page. 

  • If you have any questions about the research now or later, or if you think you have a research-related injury, please contact our McMaster study coordinator at 289-639-9588 or by email at COVIDLTC@mcmaster.ca.

  • If you have any questions regarding your rights as a research participant, you may contact the Office of the Chair of the Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board at 905-521-2100 ext. 4201

 

Questions You May Have About COVID-19 Vaccinations

  • We learned so much about how well these vaccines work. Older adults often do not respond very well to vaccines. However, the mRNA Vaccines that we use in our long-term care communities have provided a high level of protection, much higher than we would expect from other vaccine types. However, we have learned that this protection seems to wane very quickly. We learned that residents do not have good immune responses after 6 – 9 months following the second dose. This is what lead us to recommend the third dose. We also found that there was some waning in the antibodies after the third dose. This is why we recommended a fourth dose. Overall the vaccines have been incredible at preventing death, hospitalization and serious health outcomes.

  • We know that people that have been infected and are not vaccinated are not very well protected against other infections. We know that people that have been vaccinated and then infected have very powerful immune responses. The data is not yet clear whether an additional dose will boost that any higher. The current recommendation is to wait about three to six months before getting a subsequent dose. We believe in being safe rather than sorry.

  • We have to remember that the original vaccines were made to protect against the original strain of COVID-19 that was circulating in early 2020. Since then, we have had several variants emerge. The vaccine was incredibly effective at protecting against things like the Alpha and Delta variants. However, when Omicron came along, we learned that they were not quite as effective. They still provide excellent protection against hospitalization, death and long COVID. Bivalent vaccines have now been made available!

  • There are three main reasons that a long-term care resident who has been vaccinated could still be infected with COVID-19. 

    • For vaccinations to work effectively, you need a healthy immune system and people living in long-term care homes are often frail or on medications that suppress their immune response. Decades of research on other vaccines have taught us that some residents will have weaker responses or lose protection quickly and this means they might be susceptible to infections even after they are vaccinated.

    • COVID-19 vaccine trials showed that the vaccines approved for use in Canada are highly effective at preventing severe COVID-19 outcomes but we don’t exactly know how well they prevent transmission. We expect that people who have been vaccinated will still have a risk of infection if they are exposed. As such, employees or visitors still might bring the virus into the home and expose vulnerable residents. 

    • It’s possible the existing vaccines do not ward off all the new variants that are appearing and we predict that current vaccines might not be as effective against variants.

    • We hope to address these concerns through this study.