Professor Colin Simpson awarded prestigious Liley Medal
The award, from the Royal Society Te Apārangi and the Health Research Council, was presented to Professor Simpson for his contributions to confirming the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Professor Simpson, associate dean (research) of Te Wāhanga Tātai Hauora—Wellington Faculty of Health at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, was lead author of a 2021 paper published in Nature Medicine, looking at the effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine used in New Zealand.
He received the medal at an awards ceremony at Parliament on Tuesday 22 November.
Professor Simpson says the work began over 10 years ago in a project funded by the Department of Health in the United Kingdom and involving his colleagues from the University of Edinburgh.
“The project, Early Estimation of Vaccine and Anti-Viral Effectiveness (EAVE), was set up in 2012 after the swine flu pandemic a couple of years before. We’d felt that, as researchers, we weren’t prepared for the outbreak, and without something in place, we wouldn’t be prepared for another one.
“It was strange because we did all the foundational work up to the point of getting it running. The methodology, the ethics, the people—all the nuts and bolts were there for a project we hoped would never have to happen.”
But in 2020 when the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Professor Simpson says he was told to prepare to trigger the project.
“As things got more serious, particularly when it hit the north of Italy, people obviously got very, very worried.
“The original project had been very frugal, but suddenly we had justification for a lot more funding, which meant we could survey a lot more people.”
The extra funding allowed the EAVE team to “snap into action”, renaming itself as Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of COVID-19 (EAVE II).
The EAVE II team successfully tracked the COVID-19 pandemic in near real-time, from December 2020 and April 2021 surveying the 2.53 million Scotland residents who received their first dose of the vaccine—57.5 percent of the adult population. It was this data that Professor Simpson used to write his paper.
“The massive dataset meant we could properly analyse how the vaccine was performing in the real world, looking at if it was good at stopping the virus, stopping severe reactions, and whether it was safe.
“We had to determine the vaccine’s safety in relation to a whole load of different diseases, and whether people’s reactions were vaccine associated or something that would have occurred anyway.”
In total, the EAVE II team surveyed the 5.4 million people registered with GPs in Scotland, around 98 percent of the Scottish population .
Professor Simpson says they identified a link in Scotland between the AstraZeneca vaccine and a rare blood clotting disease, and very quickly informed the UK government. The Pfizer vaccine used in New Zealand got a clean bill of health.
“It’s our job to cut through the fog. We’ll never understand everything, but through a constant cycle of improvement, I see our role as providing the best information we can to policy makers to decide how to respond.”
Health Research Council chief executive Professor Sunny Collings says the incredible speed at which this study was completed was of paramount importance as some countries in Europe had already halted or limited use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, and there were concerns that safety fears would drive vaccine hesitancy among the public.
“The results of this study came at a critical point in worldwide vaccination programmes. The ability of Professor Simpson and his team to provide rapid reassurance of the safety and effectiveness of these COVID-19 vaccines was globally impactful and likely saved many lives by encouraging a high vaccine uptake.”
Professor Collings says addressing these safety concerns in New Zealand was particularly important as vaccine hesitancy is greater in Māori communities, who are a high-risk population.
“It was imperative that we had teams of independent scientists looking into the effectiveness and safety of these vaccines in the real world, beyond clinical trials. If this study had showed up lots of red flags, New Zealand may have turned towards another vaccine. Reassuringly, it showed that New Zealand identified the right vaccine.”
Professor Simpson says the work is directly feeding into his role as associate dean and his teaching at the University.
“I think we’re really punching above our weight—for a relatively new faculty, my colleagues are doing some fantastic cutting-edge research.
“And excellent research and excellent teaching go hand in hand.”