Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccination on Transmission: A Systematic Review
, Graciela Morales 5, John M. McLaughlin 6 and Moe H. Kyaw 6,*
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript was written by Anouk et al, entitled Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination on transmission: Systematic review is a well-written article and gives a sound knowledge to the readers on vaccine effectiveness.
Minor comment
During the COVID era all over the world, people were told to use non-pharmaceutical protection/reducing transmission methods which in most parts of the world is mandatory even after vaccination.
1. How did the authors manage these biases to estimate the effectiveness of the vaccines used?
2. In the introductory part better to add one or two sentences about the use of non-pharmaceutical methods of disease control and their importance for vaccine effectiveness.
Best
Author Response
The section in the introduction on non-pharmaceutical interventions is extended with additional information and references. For a better balance between these non-pharmaceutical interventions and COVID-19 vaccines, we also provided somewhat more introductory text on COVID-19 vaccines.
In the limitations in the discussion we added a statement that differences in non-pharmaceutical interventions policies were not implemented in the analyses of the included studies. Please see in the attached revised version with the track change.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper concerns a review of the literature on the impact of vaccination against COVID-19 on indirect protection of unvaccinated persons. The authors analyzed a number of papers concerning this problem. The review was made reliably and it is clearly described. However, the conclusions seem to be rather obvious, i.e., it should be expected that vaccination reduces transmission and viral load. An interesting observation is that vaccination was less effective in the case of the omicron variant. Conclusion section is very short and general. The Authors wrote that "well-timed vaccination programs may help reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission". But how to choose the proper time of vaccination? It would be interesting if the authors wrote a bit more on this topic.
Author Response
In the discussion additional information is implemented in two separate paragraphs on the lower vaccine effectiveness for the omicron variant and the timing of vaccination programs. These sections provide background information for the conclusion.
The word count is increased from 3577 in the original version to 4282 in the revised version.
Please see the revised version with the track change.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
