Vageesh Jain

• MBBS MPH FFPH
• Fellow at University College London

Objectives: COVID-19 has a varied clinical presentation. Elderly patients with comorbidities are more vulnerable to severe disease. This study identifies specific symptoms and comorbidities predicting severe COVID-19 and intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Methods: A literature search identified studies indexed in MEDLINE, EMBASE and Global Heal...

Background: Population groups to be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccinations in the U.S. have been determined at the Federal level, but there is variation in how States have implemented guidance. This review examines how the position of population groups in vaccine priority lists varies between Federal guidance and State practice. Methods: An online...

Background: Excess mortality has been used to assess the overall health impact of COVID-19 across countries. Democracies aim to build trust in government and enable checks and balances on decision making, which may be useful in a pandemic. But during the pandemic, they have been criticised as being hesitant to enforce restrictive public health mea...

Objectives: Disease control is important to limit the social, economic and health effects of COVID-19 and reduce the risk of novel variants emerging. Evidence suggests vaccines are less effective against the Omicron variant, but their impact on disease control is unclear. Methods: We used a longitudinal fixed effects Poisson regression model to ass...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic and associated non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have affected all countries. With a scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines there has been a need to prioritize populations, but assessing relative needs has been challenging. The COVAX Facility allocates vaccines to cover 20% of each national population, followed by a ne...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed faults in the way we assess preparedness and response capacities for public health emergencies. Existing frameworks are limited in scope, and do not sufficiently consider complex social, economic, political, regulatory, and ecological factors. One Health, through its focus on the links among humans, animals, and ec...

The Joint External Evaluation (JEE) assesses national capacities to implement the International Health Regulations (IHR). Previous studies have found that higher JEE scores are associated with fewer communicable disease deaths. But given the impact of COVID-19 in many countries, including those believed to have developed IHR capacities, the validit...

Emergency health kits are a vital way of providing essential medicines and supplies to health clinics during humanitarian crises. The WHO non-communicable diseases (NDCs) kit was developed 5 years ago, recognising the increasing challenge of providing continuity of care and secondary prevention of NCDs and exacerbations, in such settings. Monitorin...

Background Assessing relative needs for COVID-19 vaccines across countries has been challenging. The objective of this study was to identify the most important factors for assessing countries’ needs for vaccines, and to weight each, generating a scoring tool for prioritising countries. Methods The study was conducted between March and November 202...

Background Several countries paused their rollouts of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in mid-March 2021 due to concerns about vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia. Many warned that this risked damaging public confidence during a critical period of pandemic response. This study investigated whether the pause in the use of the Oxfo...

The equitable global allocation of COVID-19 vaccines has received much attention yet been poorly defined. Understanding equity requires assessing needs for vaccines across countries. Making distinctions is especially challenging when countries perform similarly on traditional epidemiological metrics. This Viewpoint offers a novel conceptual framewo...

High-dose exercise-induced cardiac outcomes may vary between sexes. However, many studies investigating the cardiovascular effects of high-dose exercise have excluded or under-recruited females. This scoping review aimed to describe the recruitment of females in studies assessing the impact of high-dose exercise on cardiovascular outcomes and descr...

Background Several countries paused their rollouts of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in mid-March 2021 due to concerns about vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia. Many warned that this risked damaging public confidence during a critical period of pandemic response. This study investigated whether the pause in the use of the Oxfo...

Background Excess mortality has been used to assess the health impact of COVID-19 across countries. Democracies aim to build trust in government and enable checks and balances on decision-making, which may be useful in a pandemic. On the other hand, democratic governments have been criticised as slow to enforce restrictive policies and being overly...

Purpose of review: The COVID-19 pandemic is a global catastrophe that has led to untold suffering and death. Many previously identified policy challenges in planning for large epidemics and pandemics have been brought to the fore, and new ones have emerged. Here, we review key policy challenges and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic in ord...

Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Introduction Cardiovascular adaptations as a result of exercise conducted at high-intensity and high-volume are often termed the ‘Athlete’s heart’. Studies have shown that these cardiovascular adaptations vary between sexes. It is important that both sexes are well represented in this literat...

Objectives: Health technology assessments (HTAs) have been suggested as a strategy to bridge the evidence-to-policy gap in public health. It is unclear to what extent HTAs have been prepared to assist decisions to implement public health interventions (PHIs). We aimed to describe the experience of HTA agencies by mapping, classifying, and analyzing...

Background: Population groups to be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccinations in the U.S. have been determined at the Federal level, but there is variation in how States have implemented guidance. This review examines how the position of population groups in vaccine priority lists varies between Federal guidance and State practice. Methods: An online...

Background: Coronavirus disease (COVID)-secure workplace guidance, including the prompt self-isolation of those with COVID-19 symptoms, is fundamental to disease control in workplaces. Despite guidance, a large number of workplace outbreaks have been observed. This study aimed to identify the proportion of symptomatic staff members attending workp...

Introduction One of the leading challenges in the 2013–2016 West African Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak was how best to quickly identify patients with EVD, separating them from those without the disease, in order to maximise limited isolation bed capacity and keep health systems functioning. Methodology We performed a systematic literature rev...

The unprecedented speed and scale of spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic has forced policymakers and clinicians to operate with limited evidence for the relative success of different control measures. In the words of Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, ‘with 50% of the knowledge we have to make 100% of the decisions’.1 Understanding mortality diffe...

Effective test, trace, and isolate (TTI) systems have featured alongside other measures in a number of high-income countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan. Such strategies can be more efficient than mass testing or screening approaches under certain circumstances. Modellers have found that targeted contact tracing would mitigate the risk of a sec...

Purpose/setting The extent to which distributional equity is incorporated into evaluations of the (potential or observed) impact of health taxes is unclear. This systematic review of economic and modelling evaluations investigating taxation on tobacco, sugar-sweetened-beverages (SSBs), or alcohol aims to assess the proportion that have considered...

Health taxes can be extremely cost effective, often generating revenue, while delivering large improvements in population health. Decisions on tax are not usually considered in the same way as other health interventions, which limits their use. The success and proliferation of health technology assessment (HTA) bodies gives us the opportunity to wi...

Effectively responding to global health emergencies requires substantial financial commitment from many stakeholders, including governments, multilateral agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. A major current policy challenge needs attention: how to better coordinate investment among actors aiming to address a common problem, disease outbreak...

Back in 1985, Geoffrey Rose transformed the way we think about improving health. Yet despite their proven effectiveness, the population level interventions he supported remain relatively unexploited, due to their political, multi-stakeholder nature. Health taxes provide an inimitable opportunity to invest in health whilst generating public sector r...

Background/introduction COVID−19, a novel coronavirus outbreak starting in China, is now a rapidly developing public health emergency of international concern. The clinical spectrum of COVID−19 disease is varied, and identifying factors associated with severe disease has been described as an urgent research priority. It has been noted that elderly...

Background Taxing harmful products—such as tobacco, sugar, or alcohol—is a valuable way to improve population health. However, it is argued that excise duties on goods are regressive, because the payment burden falls on the poorest people. The extent to which distributional equity is incorporated into evaluations of the (potential or observed) effe...

The White Helmets, a group of emergency response volunteers, have received international acclaim for their heroic work in the Syrian civil war. On 21 July 2018, approximately 422 White Helmet volunteers and their families were successfully evacuated from Syria by the Israel Defense Forces. Vageesh Jain argues that future evacuations of aid workers...

Purpose of review: Less than two decades into the 21st century, the world has already witnessed numerous large epidemics or pandemics. These events have highlighted inadequacies in both national and international capacity for outbreak prevention, detection, and response. Here, we review some of the major challenges from a policy perspective. Rece...

Background There are considerable phenotypic and neuroimmune overlaps between myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and multiple sclerosis (MS). While the precise aetiologies of both MS and ME/CFS are unclear, evidence suggests that deterioration in cognitive function is widely prevalent in patients with either condition. Litt...

Background Previous studies have found low use of anticoagulation prior to stroke, in people with atrial fibrillation (AF). This study examined data on patients with AF-related stroke from a population-based stroke register, and sought to examine changes in management of AF prior to stroke, and reasons for suboptimal treatment, in those who were kn...

Factors associated with anticoagulant prescription in high-risk patients (CHA2DS2-VASc≥2); results of multivariable logistic regression analysis. (DOCX)

Universal health coverage (UHC) has received a great deal of attention over the past decade, with the World Health Organization (WHO) leading the global advocacy effort. Access to affordable healthcare is principally important in combating large infectious disease outbreaks of an international scale. The extensiveness of the Zika virus outbreak in...

Glaucoma is one of the most common causes of irreversible blindness, globally. Findings from the Blue Mountain Eye Study suggest a moderate positive association between smoking and increased IOP (a significant risk factor for glaucoma). The previous two reviews investigating the association between smoking and primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) sho...

Aim: The aim of this study was to identify factors predicting actual or intended adherence to antivirals as treatment or prophylaxis for influenza. Method: Literature from inception to March 2015 was systematically reviewed to find studies reporting predictors of adherence to antivirals and self-reported reasons for non-adherence to antivirals....

Over the past decade India has seen a shift in its burden of disease, with a relatively large decrease in the burden of communicable disease and an increase in non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The global burden of disease study, published in 2015, found that from 1990 to 2013 the proportion of disability adjusted life years (DALYs) attributable to...

Objective This study aims to explore what adolescents report as the best and worst aspects of having a father in the UK military. Methods Qualitative data were collected from 171 adolescents aged 11–16 years, via an online questionnaire exploring the impact of paternal military service on childhood well-being (response rate=70%). Questions about th...

In the UK, the General Medical Council clearly stipulates that upon completion of training, medical students should be able to discuss the principles underlying the development of health and health service policy, including issues relating to health economics. With the National Health Service facing the threat of large gaps in funding, there is pre...