Giving the pneumococcal vaccine to the elderly is a waste of time because it does not protect them against pneumonia, a study has found.
The jab is currently given to over 65s but the researchers concluded that a better policy would be to vaccinate children instead.
The meta-analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal looked at 22 trials involving more than 100,000 people and found that only high-quality studies produced reliable results, but that these had all failed to find any evidence that pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccines (PPVs) could prevent pneumonia.
Those who received them were not less likely to contract pneumonia than those who had not been vaccinated and there was little difference in risk of death.
Researcher Dr Matthias Egger of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern in Switzerland said: “The prevention of the large burden of disease associated with pneumococcal pneumonia should be a major objective from a public health perspective. This will not be achieved with the use of the currently available pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine, even allowing for a modest protective effect against invasive pneumococcal disease.
He added: “Countries that have introduced pneumococcal conjugate vaccines into childhood immunization programs can reasonably expect to experience reductions in the incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease, even among unvaccinated adults, because of reduced transmission of vaccine-type pneumococci in the population.”
But Cochrane reviewers of the vaccine warned that the researchers’ conclusions “go well beyond their evidence”
One of them Dr Ross Andrews of the Child Health Division at Menzies School of Health Research in Australia, said he did not dispute the potential of childhood immunization to provide indirect benefit to adults arising from herd immunity but emphasised that this conclusion was beyond the scope of the meta-analysis.
“The evidence cited to support this claim of indirect benefit arises from observational studies. However, the authors did not consider other data from observational studies on the direct impact of pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine on invasive pneumococcal disease,” he said. “It seems unlikely that childhood vaccination alone will be adequate to prevent invasive pneumococcal disease in adults.”